Big Journalism Is Finally Losing... It
There are many ongoing investigations into Big Tech™ and Julia Angwin is excited:
It’s easy to miss it amid the nonstop avalanche of news, but we are on the cusp of a technology revolution — one that could usher in an entirely new information landscape.
Technology revolution? New information landscape? That sounds great! It's also not going to happen. At least not in the way Angwin envisions. In fact, what's far more likely to happen is the opposite of what she imagines.
After 30 years of shockingly few regulatory restraints, America’s tech giants were beginning to operate almost like wrecking balls, slamming their weight into industry after industry and taking them out one after another. Boom. Uber crushed the taxi limousine business. Boom. Facebook toppled the news business. Boom. Amazon wiped out numerous small retailers.
Finally, our courts are beginning to push back.
Why would the courts be responsible for pushing back against this? If there was something illegal in any of the above, sure. But that's not what she's suggesting. She's seemingly suggesting that certain types of businesses should be protected by the courts. Why? Because she likes them and deems them worthy of protecting against other businesses that out-competed them in the market. Okay.1
She immediately goes on to talk about a couple of cases where the courts did rule against two Big Tech players recently – notably, Apple and Google. And ropes in Meta here even though the court has not yet ruled against them (and is seemingly unlikely to). It's a rather blatant attempt to bucket all these situations together as if they're the same thing, illegal monopoly behavior, for the literal sake of the argument, when the reality of each of these cases are quite different and nuanced. Shocking, I know.
In the Google Search case, my bet would be that the court keeps it simple by ending the practice of paying for default placement (but still allowing Google to pay players like Apple and Mozilla a revenue share based on usage/performance). I don't think they'll force the company to sell off Chrome because I don't think it would do much of anything other than either install a new king of the market if they give it to a large AI player like OpenAI, and perhaps hurt the web more broadly if Google stops investing in Chromium. (I do think the AI element of all this is the far more compelling aspect to watch and see how the court handles it – because it's about the future, not the past.)
With Apple, I agree with the decision to force the company to allow for links to the web where third-party payments can be processed. Yet that was just a sliver of what Epic wanted and accused Apple of, but failed to prove in their case. Apple won on every other count, which Angwin doesn't mention, of course. Still, it's a nice big door that opened – and now seems to be staying ajar. But it had less to do with Epic and more a self-own by Apple. First and foremost by getting far too greedy in both their control of the App Store and literally greedy in the cut they were demanding. And, of course, they did themselves no extra favors by perhaps lying to the court about the above.
Meta is a company also with all sorts of issues, but does that mean we should be fully litigating in hindsight to rip away deals that are a decade-plus old? What would that actually do besides destroy Meta (if Instagram were forced to be spun out)? All because Facebook toppled the news business? Please. They're all just really different cases. Yes, they're all Big Tech, but that's really the only commonality here.
Reining in Big Tech appears to be one of the few bipartisan policies that has spanned the Biden and Trump administrations, despite the tech titans’ attempts to curry favor with the new president. Taken together, these developments could end years of stagnation and usher in more competition, smaller companies and better services. I personally can’t wait for competition in the search market — as Google results have been getting worse, by many estimates, including my own.
I’m tired of sifting through Google’s increasingly cluttered and irrelevant search results, searching in vain for the latest news and instead finding only Reddit posts. I want a search engine for shopping that trawls the web for the best merchandise rather than just pulling from the sites that list items with Google. I want a search engine that doesn’t allow ads to masquerade as reviews. I want a search engine that lets me control the amount of artificial intelligence summaries in my results. And there are probably even cooler search products that a new generation of search entrepreneurs will dream up.
I don't disagree with the high-level notion of Google Search getting worse over time – as would anyone with eyes. But to me, that's largely about cramming more ads in, nothing with the actual results (though in some ways they're one in the same problem). You could also call this getting too greedy, but really it's just a company executing the mandate from the market to keep growing revenue. (Apple, naturally has the same mandate, as does Meta, as does every public company, of course.)
Aside from Angwin's product specs laying out ideas that have failed time and time again in the market (because of a lack of competition, she would say, but I would bet that even in a world where Google was dissolved, whatever popped-up to take its place would have looked a lot like... Google, not like these personal product desires), what do we really think is more likely: that regulation will force the search market to be more competitive, or that the market itself will force that to happen? I mean, the latter is already happening – naturally.
Angwin dismisses new competition like Perplexity as a "mirage" but I bet if we fast forward a year or two, she'll be singing a different tune. I, like most people, was skeptical that the AI tools would be able to take over search functionality, now I'm certain of it. Because it has already happened for me. And for young people, they'll grow up in a world where such usage is the norm. Including, perhaps, Google's own AI, as the case may be.
Even if the courts do force Google to share search data with others. I'm guessing that won't shift the market much, if at all. Google already does this in Europe. No one cares. What shifts the market are the new AI products. Again, it's already happening. Without the courts.
It’s worth remembering that antitrust rulings are necessary but not sufficient to increase competition. Think of the 1984 landmark breakup of AT&T, which prompted all sorts of great innovations, from the popularization of portable radios to lower-priced long-distance calls, but didn’t last. Twenty years later, the Baby Bells largely recombined, leaving us with the current duopoly of AT&T and Verizon. Their dominance in the market has kept American cellphone service and broadband internet both more expensive and worse than our European peers.
Aside from the fact that this inclusion sort of inconveniently undercuts the whole argument, it's also decidedly more nuanced than a paragraph can convey. Everyone making the argument for the courts loves to point to AT&T – including Lina Khan, in yet another misguided NYT op-ed – but, of course, AT&T pre-empted that action. And that, in turn, helped land much of the innovation Angwin cites. Did the courts influence that move, of course. That case also started 50 years ago.
The more recent case always cited is the Microsoft one. That was a mere 25 years ago, and, well, actually did little if anything to disrupt Microsoft. Because the market did that. And was always going to do that. Also, Microsoft is currently the most valuable company in the world. Right now. In 2025. Angwin leaves them out of this – aside from noting their failure with Bing – but certainly she must not like that fact one bit.
But hey, the courts are finally winning. Big Tech is finally losing. Innovation by way of regulation can thrive at last! We can get a shopping search engine or whatever. I'm sure the same things won't happen over and over again because that might suggest that natural market forces are at play here and generally work. But there are other countries in which to live if you'd prefer a more top-down approach...
1 It's also a funny bit of revisionist history given the state of the taxi industry when Uber swept into the market – because of the state of that market with firmly entrenched players, to put it nicely.