The Bipartisan Anti-BigTech Push Reveals Tech is Already Doomed

Negative social mood is ushering in negative views of technology. Instead of ushering in utopia, technology and technology companies will enslave the world to racist/SJW/CCP AI, take everyone's jobs and destroy the world. The shift in sentiment accompanied the ever sinking social mood. Attention from politicians also tells us the time to short technology is at hand. The last major tech anti-trust case came as the market was peaking and wasn't concluded until the bear market was underway.

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Elizabeth Warren is the latest politician to make an explicit threat against Big Tech.

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"Today, we have companies like Amazon: they have a platform. I buy a coffee maker and use it all the time, but Amazon also sucks out an incredible amount of info about every buyer and every seller. Then, Amazon makes the decision to have a competing coffee machine and drive out the business in that space," she explained. "They have this incredible advantage from the information they get from their platform and the fact they can also manipulate the platform, putting themselves on page 1 and put the competitor on page 16 where no one ever goes... My view is break those things apart, and we'll have a more robust market in America."

Governments always close the barn door after the horse is long gone. Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank were passed after major financial crises. Regulations are often cut to spur an economy, but politicians also often top-tick social mood and the economy. The Depression Era Glass-Steagall law was repealed in the late 1990s, not in the 1940s or early 1980s when it would have made more sense from a policy perspective.

Similarly, the attention to BigTech comes after the company has dominated its market and is on the way to possibly losing the next one. The last major anti-trust case was against Microsoft (MSFT) in the 1990s and it wasn't decided until June 2001, after the stock market had entered a bear market. The Nasdaq had already lost two-thirds of its value. Moreover, Microsoft was already well on its way to losing its dominant market position.

Now Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) face scrutiny. These companies have more power than Microsoft in the 1990s and they've abused it in ways that go far beyond Microsoft keeping competing browsers off new PCs. They've violated free speech rights and data privacy laws. They've created Orwellian systems to control thought and speech that mirror China's extensive censorship system. Amazon in particular has taken advantage of extremely outdated legal theories of monopoly and anti-trust. It used to be that a grocery store and a car dealer had little in common. A conglomerate with control of both couldn't transfer monopoly power from one to the other. In the Information Age, everything is linked. Amazon will wipe out pharmacies and groceries soon if something isn't done.

Amazon is probably the most similar to Microsoft and Standard Oil because it is more focused on commercial profit. Absent government regulation, it appears as if Amazon will continue dominating markets. Twitter, Facebook and Google, on the other hand, are interfering in elections and public debate. That they are doing this at all is a sign that they have probably reached the limits of their markets or at least the accelerating growth phase. They've shifted from growing their market to abusing it, turning off customers or banning them outright. Many technology companies are riddled with employees who put politics above profits. In some cases, they're already in upper management and it's unlikely the companies will ever recover. The decadence takes a different form, but it always marks cyclical peaks.

The right and the left hate BigTech. Anyone who wants to punch BigTech will find a bipartisan audience cheering them on. Many are focused on how this will harm BigTech companies, but the larger truth is that it's happening because BigTech's peak in this cycle has already passed. By the time government gets around to regulation and anti-trust, some of these companies may already be on their way out, if not gone, or their stock prices down 50 to 90 percent.