At Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center, the “Open to Debate” podcast convened an audience of students, journalists, and policy thinkers to dissect one of the defining questions of our era: Should the U.S. government break up Big Tech?

On stage were four heavyweight voices: Bharat Ramamurti and Matt Stoller arguing Yes, that concentrated tech power threatens competition, democracy, and innovation, and Jennifer Huddleston and Geoffrey Manne arguing No, that Big Tech’s scale drives consumer welfare, technological progress, and economic efficiency.

For technologists, this debate went beyond law and economics. It was a mirror reflecting the deep structural tension between software-driven innovation and the governance systems designed for industrial-era corporations.

The Case for Breaking Up Big Tech

Bharat Ramamurti led his opening with an almost Rooseveltian invocation of America’s antitrust legacy. “When firms get too big and too powerful… we break them up,” he said, aligning Big Tech’s dominance with the trusts of the 20th century: railroads, Standard Oil, Hollywood, and AT&T. The message was clear, monopoly has long been seen as anti-capitalist, not pro-market.

Ramamurti drew sharp analogies: Amazon as the new railroad, controlling the “rails” of e-commerce; Google as the information gatekeeper deciding whose products or voices are seen; and Apple’s App Store as a tollbooth for digital innovation. The logic followed a simple pattern: when the platform both hosts and competes, consumer choice erodes.

He cited over 1,000 tech acquisitions in two decades, arguing that these “strategic absorptions” have smothered rivals before they could breathe. The result, he claimed, is “a 50% drop in investment” in sectors where big tech operates, an antithesis to the startup dynamism that once defined Silicon Valley.

Stoller advanced the argument from markets to power. He framed today’s tech conglomerates as “private governments”, wielding authority over speech, commerce, and even political norms. In his words, “When an algorithm changes on Meta or Google, ten thousand businesses cry out in the night.”

His image of tech CEOs, Bezos, Musk, Pichai, Zuckerberg, sitting together at Trump’s inauguration became a symbol of the fusion between corporate and state power. For technologists, this signals a warning: the architects of infrastructure may soon become its governors.

Stoller’s critique landed hardest when discussing systemic fragility: with AWS and Azure controlling 60% of cloud computing, he asked, what happens when they fail? The recent AWS outage disrupting airlines and banks was, in his view, a microcosm of the new “digital monopoly risk.”

The Case for Keeping Big Tech Intact

Jennifer Huddleston, from the Cato Institute, countered with a crisp reminder that antitrust isn’t meant to punish size, it’s meant to protect consumers. The American tradition since the 1970s, she noted, is guided by the consumer welfare standard, which measures harm through price, quality, and innovation.

“What does a breakup mean for the American consumer?” she asked. In Europe, where regulators have constrained integration, users often lose features and convenience, “the Google Map that vanishes from your search results, the app that can no longer ship in two days.”

Huddleston’s emphasis on innovation at scale resonated with technologists who understand how integrated ecosystems enable new capabilities. Large firms, she argued, “anchor the infrastructure” for AI, quantum computing, and global data pipelines, fields requiring R&D budgets that exceed the reach of any startup. Breaking them up, she cautioned, could “disperse the resources that actually power the next frontier.”

Her partner, Geoffrey Manne, pushed further, calling the breakup movement “a moral crusade disguised as economics.” He warned that dissolving companies not for proven consumer harm but for political unease would “hand the government a loaded gun with no safety.”

Manne’s argument embodied a technologist’s pragmatism: progress thrives on complex systems, not legislative purity. The digital ecosystem, he said, is a “web of deflationary services”, search, email, maps, all priced at zero to the user. “Shipping logistics have been revolutionized. AI competition is relentless. These are not symptoms of monopoly,” he stated. “They’re hallmarks of productivity.”

As he reminded the audience, the largest tech firms spend $200 billion annually on R&D, outpacing the investments of most nations. In a line that provoked laughter, he pointed out: “Maybe they don’t face a competitor that looks just like them, but they act as if they’re in a death match.”

Clash of Worldviews: Innovation, Power, and Policy

Where the debate grew most nuanced was around innovation and uncertainty.

Ramamurti’s camp cited Microsoft’s 1990s antitrust case as proof that limiting a monopolist unleashed the web revolution. “Without that enforcement,” he argued, “we might all still be living under Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.”

Huddleston flipped the same example: Microsoft’s antitrust distraction, she said, “delayed their entry into mobile”, a lost decade in which Apple and Google soared. Her point: government intervention has opportunity costs, especially when innovation cycles now move in months, not years.

Manne challenged the notion that lobbying equates to control: “If money truly bought power, Michael Bloomberg would be president,” he quipped. He reminded listeners that “virtually any company with 50 people can afford to influence Congress,” suggesting that political capture is not a monopoly of Big Tech, but a feature of governance itself.

Yet Stoller’s rebuke cut sharply: “When you put forward regulation and deal with a monopoly, the monopoly tends to capture the regulation for its own benefit.” That, he argued, is why Washington’s failure to pass a comprehensive privacy law, despite bipartisan will, proves the limits of regulating concentrated power.

At times, the exchange veered deeply philosophical. Stoller declared, “You have to have moral principles guiding what you do. Too much consolidated power is dangerous.” Manne countered, “Do you really see no difference between shareholders breaking up a company and the government doing it? There’s a massive moral gap between markets and coercion.”

For technologists used to thinking in design patterns and system models, this moment clarified the underlying divide:

• The “Yes” side views scale as a concentration risk, a single point of ethical and operational failure.
• The “No” side sees scale as integration architecture, the only way to build the next layer of global innovation.

The Audience Joins the Equation

The Hopkins forum’s audience, a mix of undergraduates, researchers, and policy veterans, pressed the debaters on the practical boundary between “legitimate civic engagement” and “political capture.” Ramamurti quoted Justice Brandeis: “We can either have concentrated power in a few hands, or democracy, but not both.”

One student asked about biotech: if AI-powered health discovery depends on Microsoft’s cloud, would a breakup stall medical research? Huddleston warned it might literally “break up teams working together on fundamental research.” Ramamurti countered, “If four competing firms raced toward biotech breakthroughs instead of one, which world would innovate faster?” The audience murmured; nothing about this question was abstract anymore.

From a Technologist’s Vantage Point

This debate, equal parts economic theory and moral philosophy, captured an essential civic dilemma of the digital age. Technologists who build or invest in scalable systems face the same paradox daily: scale drives both progress and dependence.

Breaking up Big Tech could unleash a new wave of interoperability, open standards, and entrepreneurial innovation. But integration, the technologist’s holy grail, enables the seamless user experiences and cost efficiencies consumers now take for granted.

The truth may lie not in breaking or building, but in re-architecting power, through interoperability mandates, data portability, and algorithmic transparency rather than industrial-style dismemberment. Unlike the railroads or oil refineries of the past, today’s empires are made of code, not steel.

For all the rhetorical fireworks, both sides agreed on one thing: technology has outpaced the frameworks built to govern it. Whether we call it monopoly or innovation, the next era of digital capitalism will require rethinking not just how big companies should be, but what kind of societies we want them to serve.

Open to Debate podcast available here.

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