One of the peculiarities of monopolies in the age of Big Tech is how they tend to leverage quickly into a group of monopolies.
Historically, building a monopoly was a rare business event, and it usually just happened in a single industry, like oil or finance.
But the tech industry is different: businesses build one monopoly (legally, let’s assume).
Then they quickly manage to leverage it into multiple monopolies across an array of businesses.
You can read recent press reports about antitrust enforcement actions against Google and Meta, to take those prominent examples.
Traditional antitrust/competition law developed to restrain individual monopolies from leveraging their existing monopolies unfairly into new markets. But historical law seems to struggle with how to address this new phenomenon of companies that develop a portfolio of monopolies. Of course, these tech companies leverage their monopolies to develop and support each other, in particular by sharing user data, given that all these monopolies are based on processing vast amounts of user data. The more you have, the better you can leverage into a new market. That’s why this antitrust/competition conundrum is also a privacy challenge. Monopolies that process personal data and share them across their portfolio of services are processing personal data at a scale unprecedented in human history. Europe took a first step to try to address this problem with its Digital Markets Act.
We don’t have a legal word for a portfolio of monopolies. Calling a company a “monopolist” doesn’t capture the nature of a portfolio of interlocking monopolies. So, I looked to the wildly colorful words of English vocabularies to describe a group of animals, for inspiration.
A bloat of hippopotamuses
A parliament of owls
A gaggle of geese
A flamboyance of flamingos
A murder of crows
A company of parrots
A charm of finches
A shiver of sharks
An aggregation of snakes
A gamble of alligators
A skulk of foxes
Antitrust/competition law will have to come up with new tools to deal with this new phenomenon of portfolios of monopolies, as will the field of privacy. Any remedies that the authorities impose will need to take into account the nature of these interlocking monopolies. And yes, forcing a company with a portfolio of monopolies to divest one of its monopolies might be the right way forward, or to stop it from acquiring new ones. I doubt though that a “murder of crows” will suffer terribly if it loses one crow.
But first, let’s find a name: a “gaggle of monopolies”?, a “bloat of monopolies”? Any of the above might do, with all due respect to the animals. I’m happy to let Llama or Gemini choose.