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GANESH SITARAMAN is Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of
The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America.Too Big to Prevail
The National Security Case for Breaking
Up Big Tech
Ganesh Sitaraman
W
hen executives at the biggest U.S. technology companies are
confronted with the argument that they have grown too
powerful and should be broken up, they have a ready re-
sponse: breaking up Big Tech would open the way for Chinese dominance
and thereby undermine U.S. national security. In a new era o great-
power competition, the argument goes, the United States cannot aord
to undercut superstar companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Alpha-
bet (the parent company o Google). Big as these companies are, con-
straints on them would simply allow Chinese behemoths to gain an edge,
and the United States would stand no chance o winning the global arti-
¥cial intelligence (³°) arms race. That technology executives would prof-
fer these arguments is not surprising, but the position is gaining traction
outside Silicon Valley; even Democratic politicians who have been critical
o¤ Big Tech, such as Representative Ro Khanna o California and Senator
Mark Warner o Virginia, have expressed concerns along these lines.
But the national security case against breaking up Big Tech is not just
weak; it is backward. Far from competing with China, many big technol-
ogy companies are operating in the country, and their growing entangle-
ments there create vulnerabilities for the United States by exposing its
¥rms to espionage and economic coercion. At home, market concentra-
tion in the technology sector also means less competition and therefore
less innovation, which threatens to leave the United States in a worse
position to compete with foreign rivals. Rather than threatening to un-
dermine national security, breaking up and regulating Big Tech is neces-
sary to protect the United States’ democratic freedoms and preserve its
ability to compete with and defend against new great-power rivals.