Google is being prosecuted under anti-trust laws. It is a dominant search engine, and hence a monopoly. In economics, a monopolist exercises price control and exploits the consumers. But here Google offers free searches, news, entertainment and knowledge. However, there are issues of privacy and hate speech.

Monopolies are dislodged by innovations, and this is described as ‘creative destruction’ by Joseph Schumpeter. Innovations create new giants. Thus the answer to monopolies is not government control but innovation.

IBM dominated mainframes in the 1970s and this continued till early 1980s. PCs and laptops ended this monopoly. These are now challenged by smartphones. MySpace had 74% social network traffic in 2008 Facebook with its superior technology ended this monopoly. Nokia ruled the cell phone market, till Samsung and Apple came on the scene. Nokia has since been acquired by Microsoft. Kodak was a photography king, but digital cameras ended its rule. Later cell phones with cameras displaced even digital cameras. In music, Apple’s iTunes had a huge market share. iTunes was disrupted by Spotify and Pandora which are streaming services. These days consumers get free music from many sites such as YouTube. Netscape browser was favourite in the 1990s, the early days of Internet. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with all the PCs having windows operating system, and it became a default browser. However, by 2008, Mozilla made a dent. All bowsers have been overtaken by Google’s Chrome. Xerox was a generic name for photocopying, but soon HP, Canon and Minolta challenged it, and now it is an also-run. In search engines, Yahoo was a monopoly. Google has overtaken it.

Thus breaking up the company is tricky and unnecessary. Yes, there could be regulation over some aspects of the Big Tech firms.