America’s antitrust enforcers say they want to protect innovation. But their current cases against Big Tech are only punishing it.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched aggressive antitrust cases against companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, arguing that these firms are too dominant and that their success undermines competition. The government’s solution: break them up or force them to share the innovations and resources they created and that made them successful—like data and infrastructure—with rivals. Or even worse, obstructing the companies’ AI innovations, as in the case of Google search.
Here’s the problem: these firms didn’t become dominant by suppressing competition. They became leaders by out-innovating everyone else.
Take Google’s search engine. The court concluded that Google’s leadership came from constantly innovating to build a superior product—one that almost all consumers and business partners freely chose over alternatives. In other words, the company earned its lead in the never-ending innovation race. Yet the DOJ now claims that this very success threatens future innovation, and that Google must be punished and be forced to shackle its AI and hand over its resources to rivals.
That’s like forcing a marathon winner to share his or her time with the competition so that everyone is a winner. No one wins here.
Even in the earliest Congressional debates on the Sherman Antitrust Act, antitrust has presumed that competition spurs innovation—and for good reason. When firms compete to offer better value or lower prices, they must innovate or fail. But in recent years, antitrust authorities have shifted their thinking. Now they equate healthy competition not with the pressure to improve, but with the presence of many firms of roughly equal size and ability. Success, and especially great success, is treated as suspect, even when it’s earned through better products or lower costs.
This change in thinking is not just misguided. It’s dangerous.
In fast-moving digital markets, innovation often produces transitory dominance. When a company creates a revolutionary product—whether it’s the iPhone, Google Search, or Facebook—it can quickly come to lead the market. But that leadership is always at risk. BlackBerry once dominated mobile phones. Yahoo! once led online search. MySpace once ruled social media. What dethroned them wasn’t regulators trying to level the playing field—it was better ideas, strategies, and effort.
Digital markets evolve in tiers. In the foundational space, companies compete to invent new ecosystems—like smartphones or search systems. Once ecosystems are created, the dominant platforms compete to improve their systems—think Android vs. iOS. In the third tier, smaller developers innovate within those platforms. A healthy ecosystem has constant innovation at every level, not a forced sameness among competitors.
The danger of today’s antitrust strategies against Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta are that they try to create artificial parity at the second tier—by forcing market leaders to share the secrets of their successes with rivals that have so far fallen short. That doesn’t create more innovation. It turns the edge of innovation into a no-win zone: why build an exemplary platform that promises to overtake e-commerce, search, or social media if you’ll be punished for succeeding too much?
Worse still, these interventions often miss how market leaders continue to innovate even after achieving dominance. Google’s multiyear contracts with Apple and Mozilla, for instance, weren’t just tools of entrenchment. They provided predictability and revenue that enabled those partners to build better services, or even just survive in the case of Mozilla. Rivals tried to strike similar deals—but couldn’t match the value Google offered. That’s competition at work, not monopoly abuse.
Innovation should not be a liability. We should be celebrating companies that improve our lives and challenge them to keep innovating—not threatening to dismantle them when they do too well. America doesn’t need more equal mediocrity. It needs more breakthrough excellence.
