MAGA leaders will be watching events in a courtroom in Washington DC today very closely. Meta is defending itself against a competition lawsuit filed by the US government, which may result in the tech company being broken up. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s case argues that the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 by Facebook (as it was then known) gave the company an unfair advantage. It may seem like ancient history, but the deals provided Meta with ownership of three of the four most popular social networks today.

Zuckerberg lobbied hard to get the case dismissed. He paid $25 million to Donald Trump to settle hurt feelings after Meta ejected the President from its platforms in January 2021 (he wasn’t restored until last July). Zuckerberg also donated a further $1 million to an inauguration fund in December, and made an 11th-hour dash to avert the lawsuit. However, it was all in vain.

Trump and his circle care about this because the market holds a special position in the American psyche. It is a practical living mechanism, not an academic abstraction, and so must be seen to work for people.

Unlike the UK, which ignored questions of market dominance until it eventually resolved them by nationalising private companies after the Second World War, the United States has a long populist tradition of demanding government action to tackle the domination of markets by a handful of large companies. Theodore Roosevelt made breaking up the cartels of the Gilded Age a key plank of his “Square Deal” between workers and labour. Once in office, he got busy by filing 44 lawsuits and establishing the FTC’s precursor, the Bureau of Corporations. This actively waned with the rise of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Antitrust, which saw competition lawsuits all but disappear and takeovers rarely blocked.

But just as globalisation has collapsed, so too have various myths, notably the Panglossian view that markets are self-correcting and Big Tech can police itself. Taking a long view, this 40-year period of laissez-faire may now look like an interregnum.

Commentators concluding that Trump is in thrall to “tech” are missing some important subtleties. “Tech” is not a monolithic bloc, and key figures are deeply antagonistic. Many in MAGA, notably Vice President JD Vance, belong to the populist school, and want Big Tech broken up. Soon after entering office, Trump gave his Silicon Valley donors the head of Lina Khan, the Joe Biden-appointed chair of the FTC and an emblem of “hipster antitrust”, as they had demanded.

Trump’s new VC backers may hold the key. Marc Andreessen of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz also wants the tech giants reined in, characterising the battle as “Little Tech”. Start-ups “must go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength — incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle,” he wrote last year. Federal lawsuits against IBM and Microsoft opened up competition for the microprocessor and then the internet. There’s no let-up in Congress, either. Republican Senator Mike Lee, who has tabled several antitrust bills aimed at regulating Big Tech, now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee on competition.

The FTC v. Meta trial is expected to last for six to eight weeks, and will determine whether Zuckerberg acquired the other companies legally. Before then, we’ll know if Google is being broken up, as its own antitrust trial reaches the remedies phase. Both these cases carry significant implications for the future of Big Tech. Like the steel and railroad barons of the Gilded Age, today’s tech giants are the toll keepers who determine how other sectors can conduct their business. The trials will determine the wider shape of the economy.

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Andrew Orlowski is a business columnist at The Daily Telegraph and has covered technology competition lawsuits for 25 years.

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