Big Tech companies have grown thanks to their products

The argument

The Big Tech companies are big because big companies are the ideal in the specific context of the tech industry and given the specific needs filled by Big Tech. For example, Facebook allows people to build and maintain social networks, a purpose which is best served by having a single platform on which all social networks are hosted and integrated. Nobody wants to have to track down segregated groups of friends, family, and social contacts on a variety of competing social network sites. If each person's social network was dispersed across a group of competing companies, the end result for the consumer would be messy and redundant in comparison to what a single large company like Facebook can offer.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The network-effects point explains why a single, integrated platform is convenient for users, but convenience does not reach the conclusion that the company should not be broken up, because that is not what the breakup case actually turns on. Antitrust concern about Big Tech rests on abuse of market power — self-preferencing, foreclosing rivals, buying up competitors before they can grow, and degrading privacy and choice once dominance is secure — not on a denial that scale can deliver benefits. Scale that arises naturally from a genuinely superior integrated product is different from dominance maintained by acquiring nascent competitors such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and many breakup or structural-separation proposals target the latter without dismantling the core network. The 'single platform' benefit is, moreover, not uniquely tied to single ownership: interoperability and open standards let competing services connect and exchange, exactly as independent email providers and phone networks interoperate, so users could keep an integrated experience across firms that compete on privacy, features and terms. The argument shows that bigness has advantages for this kind of service; it does not show that those advantages require one company to own the whole market, which is what 'should not be broken up' asserts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] That users want an integrated network does not require single ownership — interoperability and open standards let competing services connect, as email providers and phone networks do, delivering integration without one firm owning the market. [Rejecting P3] The breakup case rests on abuse of market power — self-preferencing and acquiring rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp — not on denying scale's benefits, so the convenience of a large platform does not answer it.