Everyone loves the computer revolution. We extol the greatness of the start-ups and the shiny baubles which we get to play with. There is a dark side to this, however. A lot of the big financial success in technology start-ups is about "creating network effects". Each such success story has an element of an impregnable monopoly that yields supernormal profits.

This raises concerns about competition. There was a time when computer companies were workmanlike creations. Infosys or TCS are great software services companies. They were built through slow hard work over decades. In the ...