It is no news that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter and other big technological corporations have access to a lot of our data and with a lot of new technologies being discovered and innovations built on those technologies, it now looks like they are getting more data than expected. With Artificial intelligence, Amazon’s Alexa now has more data about us than what we think we are sharing, from our meals, time to go to bed and wake, TV series and many more. It now looks like data mining is the new gold mining. This particular bridge into human privacy and selling out of data has called for concern and a lot of people in the public has called for an anti-trust sue. Even though a lot of this companies have been facing legal actions and hearings, because they are really large and are having too much as a company but there is one fact which is “this people are not going anywhere, anytime soon”.
The government of so many countries have been using trust to cub monopoly and this started in the 1800s during the industrial revolution with companies using technology to an advantage to become large corporation, and at that time, the trust was going to deal with any kind of monopoly. Even Standard oil, owned by John Rockefeller faced anti-trust lawsuit, as he was a monopoly in his days buying virtually all the refineries in the United States, controlling 90% of the United States oil.
The antitrust act is against companies to big that they colonize the entire trade and inhibit the growth of competitors. The major reason for this is to encourage competition and not become an outright monopoly but the reason why a lot of big tech companies will not be broken up anytime soon is, there was a reform of the anti-trust act at some point in time.
In the 1970s, this act was reformed making it clear that a lot of companies have the ability to focus and what causes trust issues shouldn’t be based on how big the company was but the consumer welfare. Which means, if customers are good with the services and products of a company, then it should not be a threat to trust.
This is where the trust act now favors the tech giants as they are currently durable and hold a very strong market power. Since the act talks about customer welfare, then this companies aren’t going anywhere. Amazon as big as it is only enjoy a favorable market share as long as they keep giving outstanding services (even Elon Musk tweet about breaking it won’t make any difference), Google also do the same thing and their services and how customers love them is what determines how big they have become. There is really no way to break this companies for anti-trust because consumers love them are enjoying services. This is where consumer welfare comes in.