Once upon a time, in the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever. The web formed its own special exception to just about everything humanity had faced before. Personal relationships, private identity, and communication styles were all different “in cyberspace.” Logically, this also suggested the demise of the usual principles of business and economics.

What else could one conclude when, in the 2000s, a tiny blog could outdo an established media outlet? When startups seemed to come from nowhere, gain millions of users overnight, and make their founders and employees wealthier than old-school tycoons? The man who described the mood was author John Perry Barlow, who in the 1990s implored those interested in cyberspace to “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs, where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”

Excerpted from "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age" by Tim Wu Columbia Global Reports

Everything was fast and chaotic; no position was lasting. One day, AOL was dominant and all-powerful; the next, it was the subject of business books laughing at its many failures. Netscape rose and fell like a rocket that failed to achieve orbit (though Microsoft had something to do with that). MySpace, the social media pioneer, was everywhere and then nowhere. Search engines and social media sites seemed to come and go: AltaVista, Bigfoot, and Friendster were household names one moment and gone the next.

The chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. If anything, it seemed that being big, like being old, was just a disadvantage. Being big meant being hierarchical, industrial, dinosaur-like in an age of fleet-footed mammals. Better maybe to stay small and stay young, to move fast and break things.

All this suggested that in cyberspace, there could be no such thing as a lasting monopoly. The internet would never stand for it. Business was now moving at internet speed: A three-year-old firm was middle-aged; a five-year-old firm almost certainly near death. “Barriers to entry” was a 20th-century concept. Now, competition was always just “one click away.”

Tim Wu is a policy advocate, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is best known for coining the phrase "net neutrality." He worked on competition policy in the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission and served as senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General.

Even if a firm did manage to gain temporary dominance, there was nothing to be afraid of. We were not speaking of the evil monopolists of old. The new firms were instead devoted to spreading sweetness and light, goodwill toward all men—whether access to information (Google), good books for cheap (Amazon), or the building of a global community (Facebook).

Not only did they not charge high prices, sometimes they didn’t even charge at all. Google would give you free email, free map apps, free cloud storage. Hence, businesses like Facebook or Google needed to be seen as more akin to charities. Who would sue the Red Cross for its “monopoly” on disaster relief? In these heady times, only a malcontent would dare suggest that just maybe, business and economics had not quite been reinvented forever. Or that what was taken to be a new order might, in fact, just be a phase that was destined to come to an end as firms better understood the market and its new technologies. The good times were on.

After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. They hit that five-year mark of obsolescence with no signs of impending collapse or retirement. Instead, the major firms seemed to be sticking, even growing in their dominance. Suddenly, there weren’t a dozen search engines, each with a different idea, but one search engine. There were no longer hundreds of stores that everyone went to, but one “everything store.” And to avoid Facebook was to make yourself a digital hermit. There stopped being a next new thing, or at least, a new thing that was a serious challenge to the old thing.

Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. That is best exemplified by the Facebook story. Launched in 2004, Facebook quickly dispatched its rival, MySpace, which had been a rare Los Angeles tech-success story but had become a mess of intrusive advertising, fake users, and trolls. In just a few years, Facebook achieved an early dominance over general-purpose social networking.