(Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

Mar 1998: "How Yahoo! Won the Search Wars" (Fortune)

Sep 1998: Google is founded Feb 2004: Facebook is founded

Feb 2007: "Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?" (Guardian) Mar 2007: "Nokia. Can Anyone Catch the Cell Phone King?" (Forbes)

Jun 2007: iPhone released cc: @ewarren pic.twitter.com/l4CtKC9fqj — Alec 🌐 (@AlecStapp) March 13, 2019

I have frequently argued that calls to break up “Big Tech” are without merit. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple are among the greatest achievements of the American economy.

A particularly weak argument for breaking up or heavily regulating Big Tech is that those companies are immune to competition — that their position in the market is so dominant they cannot be challenged or displaced. On Twitter, Alec Stapp, a research fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics, nicely illustrates why this argument is not compelling. It was common to hear the same concerns about the predecessor companies to Google, Facebook, and Apple.