We've seen this movie before.
Upstarts seize new technological opportunity, overturning the old business order in the process. They're celebrated as entrepreneurial heroes as they grow rich and self-important. Then public opinion sours on their success.
Competitors complain they've become too powerful. The government brings antitrust action and threatens to break them up. Years of legal/political struggle ensue (cue the montage of lawyers with piles of paper, economists writing on whiteboards, and multiple presidential inaugurations). In the final act, a settlement is reached, but it's largely irrelevant: While the lawyers were fighting, a new generation of upstarts overturned the business order once again.
It happened with IBM and it happened with Microsoft. Both spent more than a decade fighting the government, and both were left behind by competitors by the time their cases were resolved.
"A federal judge has made it official: Microsoft is a monopoly, a two-ton bully that squashes competitors and cheats consumers," I wrote in 1999. "Still, no matter how much the government lawyers crow or Bill Gates complains, the fact is that the real future of the software industry is already being decided entirely outside the court system — in a technological marketplace too fast-moving and too accepting of good new ideas to be artificially held in check."
And smartphones weren't even in the picture yet.
Now both liberals and contrarian conservatives are jonesing for a remake of the familiar tale, this time with at least three villains: Google, Amazon and Facebook. When Bloomberg Businessweek ran a cover story titled "Should America's Tech Giants Be Broken Up?" Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman and deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted his answer in all-caps righteousness: "YES!" Since then, the antitrust chorus has grown louder.
But there's a problem.