Several issues are getting conflated. Big Tech dominance affects entrepreurship, privacy and free press. There are problems associated with social media and fake news and election manipulation. Nandan Nilkeni of Infosys argues that these issues may have to do with the fact that social media is not held accountable for what is posted on it, unlike the traditional media. If we treat and sue the social like the traditional media, things will start changing.

The subcommitte’s report quotes Raghuram Rajan, Sai Krishna and Zingale’s research paper. The last line of this paper merits our attention — it is dangerous to apply 20th Century economic intuitions to 21st Century problems. Anti-trust is a 20th century institution. The answer to dominance could be interoperability and data portability in networks. If users can transfer the entire location history or social media posts from the present platform to another platform, a lot of monopoly power is diluted. MasterCard and Visa have to face new the competition from open-architecture UPI payments system and Rupay card. India’s Non-personal Data Bill even proposes sharing of anonymised data. The sub-committee report is right in pointing out abuse of dominance by Big Tech firms, but it exaggerates it. And the problem can only be solved by fresh thinking.