Big tech is very good for the US. They're far more difficult to compete with in terms of scale and the resources they can deploy, than small companies. It more easily enables the US to suffocate the tech efforts of other competing nations. Giving this advantage up is extraordinarily moronic by the US. There is no benefit to the US by making it easier for the rest of the world to compete with the US golden geese. The DOJ isn't thinking that far ahead, they're playing a game of agenda.
Big Tech is stagnant and mostly good at milking the US consumer for cash. The tech industry would be better serve the average American if the market was more dynamic, and that requires breaking up the big players who are (often illegally) stifling competition.
Most of them are stagnant. That's why breaking up incumbents under antitrust laws is a great idea. GenAI and some sectors of the entertainment industry are pretty robust, but otherwise it's not great out there broadly speaking.
One may amend that most mature industries tend to move to an apparent stagnant state as the Capex for r&d increases over time, sometimes due to regulation and/ or due to increased technical complexity. There is also a point at which you can't optimize certain aspects further and have to figure out where to pivot innovation, e.g. end of dennard scaling/Moores law.
I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies, so with US companies broken up, they won't be able to compete against the foreign behemoths. The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.
>I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies,
I think there's two big things wrong with this. For one China is actually breaking up its tech companies or even culling entire sectors, like education tech, as they do in AI, this kind of argument is basically just American oligopolists inventing a red scare to stave off regulation.
Secondly American companies have a lot of trouble abroad, in gigantic markets like the EU and increasingly India and Japan with stricter privacy regulation on the way because they're so large. So if anything, American anti trust would send a good signal to most markets that the US is in line with global trends.
> The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.
This isn't because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US's economic future in jeopardy to do it.
I'm not talking about chip companies, I mean all electronic hardware: other components, PCBs, etc., are mostly all made in Asia, except for ridiculously expensive stuff made primarily for the military. There's no way that iPhones could be economically made in America, for instance.
But that's false - China broke up Ant/AliBaba. The CCP doesn't want a single company controlling their entire economy any more than the US does - granted not for exactly the same reasons
