Then there are the fines, such as a multibillion-dollar one that the Federal Trade Commission is considering to punish Facebook for privacy violations. While the fine would be the largest the agency has ever levied, it would also be far too small to make a difference. When Facebook announced it might have to hand over $5 billion as its get-out-of-jail-free card, Wall Street cheered and Facebook stock rose.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk about the ways that countries can work together to improve the online ecosystem. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand met with President Emmanuel Macron of France last week, for example, about creating an intergovernmental effort to end online extremism. While laudable in theory, very little of this hand-wringing is likely to result in any rules with heft. In addition, the prospect of governments making rules around the restriction of speech is rife with ethical dilemmas.

Finally there’s the biggest gun: Using antitrust law to break up big tech companies. Calls for antitrust action have become increasingly loud, most notably in a recent essay in this paper by the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. His statement that the company should be broken up attracted a lot of attention, especially after he called the power held by Mark Zuckerberg, his former college roommate, “un-American.” That had to hurt, even if the blow is likely to be glancing, since antitrust cases are slow-moving and hard to pull off.

And yet the idea of using antitrust to rein in these companies got a significant boost recently with the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a lawsuit from consumers aimed at how Apple runs its App Store to proceed in a lower court.

Breaking with the more conservative wing of the court in a 5-4 decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that Apple’s arguments that it wasn’t subject to a lawsuit over its app prices “disregard statutory text and precedent, create an unprincipled and economically senseless distinction among monopolistic retailers and furnish monopolistic retailers with a how-to guide for evasion of the antitrust laws.”

Apple has and will continue to argue that it is not a monopoly in either hardware and software — which is true. But the case, though narrow, is still a flashing neon sign of change. It centers on rethinking the idea of what a monopoly is with an eye to the power of the network effect. Even if a company doesn’t completely dominate its sector, if its platform can exercise what amounts to an iron-fisted control over consumers, perhaps it should be considered a monopoly after all.

[Technology has made our lives easier. But it also means that your data is no longer your own. We’ll examine who is hoarding your information — and give you a guide for what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited-run newsletter.]