Those struggling to curb the power of Big Tech should consider the theory of Vladimir Lenin’s rope. “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract,” Lenin is supposed to have said (even if there is little evidence that he ever did).
As regulators have recently been discovering, it is tough challenging the dominance of the Big Tech companies. Last week, a US federal court struck down two landmark law cases brought against Facebook, arguing the Federal Trade Commission had failed to prove that the social network exercised “monopoly power”.
But there remains an argument that, by empowering future competitors with new tools and technologies, the dominant capitalists may be unwittingly selling the rope with which they will eventually be hanged. As is the way of the world, the next generation of technology often solves the problems created by the previous one. Smart innovators invent new ways of doing things that render the old ways obsolete. Who cares about VHS’s dominance of the video cassette market any more?