Too Big to Prevail
The National Security Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
This week, lawyers made their final arguments in a landmark antitrust case brought by federal regulators against Google. U.S. President Joe Biden also recently signed a bill that would ban the social media app TikTok unless it was sold by its China-based parent company within about a year. Both moves mark major precedents in the U.S. government’s efforts to roll back the power of major technology companies.
Far from undermining U.S. competitiveness, breaking up and regulating Big Tech is necessary to protect the United States in an era of great-power competition, argued Ganesh Sitaraman in 2020. Companies act based on their commercial interests, not in the name of abstract democratic principles or for the cause of U.S. national security—and as they concentrate market power, they grow more vulnerable to pressure from Beijing. “Breaking up Big Tech won’t threaten national security,” Sitaraman writes. “It will bolster it.”