130 - Monopoly: Are Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon Fair Game?

The problem with the Monopoly board game is that only one person ends up happy in the last half hour of the game, and everyone else is miserable. 

If you believe tech critics, some of the biggest companies in the industry have figured out a way around this unhappy ending in real life: Each one of these multi-billion-dollar juggernauts has its own mini-monopoly. Google gets to rule search engines, Facebook gets social networks, Amazon gets e-commerce and Apple gets expensive phones … made by Apple … or something. I really don't get any of the arguments that Apple has a monopoly on anything. 

Why does this matter?  

One could argue – and I know this because I'm about to – that the tech companies that are in the antitrust crosshairs are more central to our everyday lives than any group of accused monopolists in history. This isn't a bunch of railroads or oil companies. This is the app you use all day to talk to your friends and family. The phone you use to fire up that app. The service you use to search for the theme gift for a 10-year wedding anniversary, and the store you use to buy the gift. 

If these companies are found to be monopolists ... and they're found to be abusing their monopoly power … they could get broken up or otherwise restricted. 

Should that happen? We're going to help you decide. With me today to figure it out, some legal firepower: 

Doug Melamed is a professor at Stanford Law School and before that was general counsel at Intel. A couple of decades ago he served at the U.S. Department of Justice as Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division. 

Dina Srinivasan is an antitrust Scholar and an author of the paper: “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook.”