Another perspective is Google is stifling American innovation by its megalithic presence in markets. Suppressing local growth in exchange for short term profitability.
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
Some things can only be done at scale, or are a side effect of solving problems at scale. It’s not quite so simple as “big is bad”.
Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
one really easy example is the AI arms race. and make no mistake, it is an arms race that matters for maintaining global American supremacy and ensuring china stays secondary. LLMs are one of the very few recent technologies where the marginal cost of a user is well above zero; they require colossal build-out of energy and compute. everyone who's done a good job with them is either a tech giant or has become one in valuation. c.f. how Google specifically has been working on TPUs for years, produced solid models with Gemini, and offers them for a tiny fraction of the cost of others. having a large team experienced with scaling stuff perhaps better than anyone else is a good thing and google keeps those people paid.
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through