2023 Articles

The Tech Giants’ Anti-regulation Fantasy

John, Richard R.

Today’s Big Five digital platforms aren’t the first tech giants to bristle at government scrutiny. Long before Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft began spending millions of dollars to fight antitrust rules and other measures that would challenge their business models, 20th-century behemoths such as AT&T and IBM were insisting that government interventions in their business would stifle innovation. In reality, one of the most important things the United States government has ever done to advance technology is regulate it.