What If Bigness Is Evil?

At the New York Times Jonathan Taplin muses over the possibilities of breaking up today’s monopolies the way Standard Oil or belatedly Ma Bell were broken up:

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale. To begin with, the platforms of Google and Facebook are the point of access to all media for the majority of Americans. While profits at Google, Facebook and Amazon have soared, revenues in media businesses like newspaper publishing or the music business have, since 2001, fallen by 70 percent.

Their impact on small Internet content publishers is even more dramatic. A dozen years ago sole proprietors could earn a modest living online. Now it’s practically impossible and that’s almost entirely due to Facebook.

The question is less whether the Internet giants are monopolies but whether they’re abusing their monopoly power to gain dominance in other markets.

And there’s another question we need to confront. Google’s company motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil”. That was dropped a few years ago when the irony became just too great. Now it’s “Do the Right Thing”.

What if bigness itself and the power that bigness brings with it promotes evil? Continually paring institutions down to human size takes a lot of courage and commitment.