A decade ago, the greed and carelessness of the financial industry dealt a serious blow to the global economy when financial products no one but their creators understood, imploded. The resulting economic collapse unleashed a wave of financial regulatory reform worldwide.

Now the tech industry — while making some things more convenient, has made serious mistakes of its own. It has abused privacy, squeezed the competition, undermined quality journalism, casually spread hate (e.g. the recent New Zealand shootings) and allowed foreign countries to influence elections. And that’s just the beginning of the list.

As a result, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple appear to be on the cusp of a wave of regulation that would have been unthinkable even two years ago.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Trudeau said he plans to introduce regulations for online platforms that will include financial penalties for the spread of misinformation, a day after signing a global pact to address violent speech on the internet.

Prime Minister Trudeau told a meeting of world leaders and technology companies in Paris on Thursday that the federal government will release a digital charter laying out how Canada plans to tackle issues such as hate speech, misinformation and election interference on the internet.

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains is expected to provide more details at a summit on digital governance in Ottawa in late May.

As many countries signed on to the digital “Christchurch Call” Wednesday, the U. S. refused to sign.

But other countries are acting.

Australia passed a stringent law that demands social media companies quickly remove violent content from their platforms in light on the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. Under the new law, social media executives could receive a prison sentence or their companies face hefty fines if the content is not taken down “expeditiously.” In the U.K., a Parliamentary committee suggested that social media companies should be subjected to independent oversight and fined over “online harms.” The U.K. is looking to appoint an independent regulator to oversee social media companies’ protection of its users and dole out penalties like fines and blocked website access where appropriate.

The much-anticipated white paper follows a U.K. Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee report that was widely seen as a condemnation of Facebook and called the company “digital gangsters.”

In the U.S. , Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who is a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, released proposals this month that would force tech breakups and impose severe restrictions on what remained.

Ms. Warren’s plan creates two tiers of companies that would fall under the new regulations: those that have an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more, and those with annual revenue of $90 million to $25 billion. The upper tier would be required to “structurally separate” their products from their marketplace. Smaller companies would be subject to regulations but would not be forced to separate themselves from the online marketplace.

Essentially, Ms. Warren is rolling out the heavy artillery of regulation: anti-trust law.

Is there a case for using anti-trust law against the big internet platforms?

The technologist Anil Dash recently described some of the internet’s biggest platform businesses as “fake markets.” These are businesses that purport to be marketplaces, making money by connecting parties — people who want rides with drivers, advertisers with eyeballs — but are not actually markets in the strict sense of the word. They’re centrally and often aggressively managed and manipulated by the big technology companies.

Some hardly resemble markets at all.

Dash singled out Uber: In that “market,” drivers don’t set prices, consumers don’t actually have any choice over who drives them, and the whole system operates by trade-secret algorithms. Our ignorance of how such things work is easier to ignore when a platform is establishing itself and sharing the benefits of its growth through low prices. This dynamic only starts to bother us when a dominant platform emerges and there are fewer alternatives or none at all. In the absence of competition, prices go up and we begin to ask questions.

The truth of the matter is that the biggest internet platforms are businesses built on an imbalance of information and therefore power. In other words, they know far more about us than we know about them. We can guess, but can’t know, why we were shown a friend’s Facebook post about a divorce, instead of another’s about a child’s birth. We can theorize, but won’t be told, why YouTube thinks we want to see a right-wing polemic about Islam in Europe after watching a video about travel destinations in France. Everything that takes place within the platforms is enabled by systems we’re told must be kept private in order for the platform’s business model to work.

The imbalance of power between ordinary citizens and giant corporations is a refrain Ms. Warren has been hitting on for years, including in a 2016 speech titled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy.” Last year, she introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, which seeks to curb shareholder power by forcing corporations to increase worker representation on their governing boards, while also reducing incentives for big companies to pay out shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses.

Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute in Washington and a former senior adviser to the Senate Budget Committee, said Ms. Warren’s plan was “practical” and “necessary.” He compared big tech companies to the tobacco monopolies of America’s past, which were eventually subjected to antitrust lawsuits.