Don’t break up the big tech companies, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute. Make them share.

To him, the recent push for investigation is a good idea, but splitting up a company like Google will make tools like search worse without making it easier for startups to build good alternatives. Even requiring companies to stop favoring their own services over those of rivals won’t keep the platforms themselves from getting better and dominating the market.

Mayer-Schönberger, who is the coauthor of Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, suggests adopting a “progressive data-sharing mandate” that forces companies above a certain size to share some of their data—anonymized for privacy—with smaller competitors. I caught up with Mayer-Schönberger this week to discuss this bold proposal, and what it can and cannot fix.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

courtesy Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Why do you believe that sharing data is the most important part of regulating Big Tech?

In every market there tends to be a push toward concentration. But for time eternal there was a counterforce, and that was human innovation. So a small startup could come up with a better idea, and that kept markets competitive.

Innovation is moving at least partially away from human ingenuity, toward data-driven machine learning. Those with access to the most data are going to be the most innovative, and because of feedback loops, they are becoming bigger and bigger, undermining competitiveness and innovation. So if we force those that have very large amounts of data to share parts of that data with others, we can reintroduce competitiveness and spread innovation.

Why would breaking up these companies hurt consumers?

You can break up a big company, but that does not address the root cause of concentration unless you change the underlying dynamic of data-driven innovation.