Trump’s Trustbusters Bring Microsoft Lessons to Big Tech Fight
DOJ’s Makan Delrahim and the FTC’s Joe Simons have agreed to divide Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple between them.
Makan Delrahim and Joe Simons.
Photographers: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg; Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Their Yalta moment took place, appropriately enough, at an invitation-only meeting of the world’s top antitrust enforcers in mid-May. As attendees at the Cartagena, Colombia, conference debated competition policy in a digital economy, Makan Delrahim, chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Joe Simons, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, divided four of the five largest U.S. tech companies between them.
After eight months of emails and discussion and decades of laissez-faire policy, they were ready to put Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google under the antitrust microscope, according to a person familiar with the matter. That decision, echoing the way Allied leaders carved up postwar Eastern Europe, launched what could be a new era of antitrust enforcement. Tech’s Big Four may not be sovereign nations, but their almost $3 trillion in combined market value exceeds many countries’ gross domestic product, and their power to determine what people read, watch, and buy is immense.