Did Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple get too big? More of the world is asking

The rise of global technology superstars like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google created new challenges for the competition watchdogs who enforce antitrust laws around the world. The companies dominate markets in e-books and smartphones, search advertising and social-media traffic. The European Union has been the most aggressive jurisdiction so far in trying to regulate Big Tech. The U.S. has largely been hands off, though that may be changing.

1. Are the tech giants monopolies?
They’re powerful, for sure. Google and Facebook Inc. together controlled 60 percent of mobile ad revenue and 51 percent of digital ad revenue globally in 2018, according to eMarketer. In the U.S., Apple Inc. has about 45 percent of the smartphone market; about 47 percent of all U.S. e-commerce sales go through Amazon.com Inc. But under modern antitrust enforcement, those percentages alone aren’t enough to alarm regulators in the U.S., which long ago stopped equating big with bad. (Standard Oil’s market share got as high as 88 percent late in the 19th century.) What’s illegal is for a monopoly to abuse its market power to prevent rivals from threatening its position. U.S. courts ruled Microsoft Corp. did so in the 1990s.