My prior post set forth in broad strokes the current Federal focus on bringing antitrust actions against major American tech companies based on alleged monopoly power derived from sheer size.  Commentators warn that, with the incredible potential power of AI, government must address the growing AI marketplace with the same jaundiced view– or perhaps, with the same great care for American commerce and politics.

Google monopolizes search engines, Amazon monopolizes retail, Meta monopolizes social media, Apple monopolizes the devices which disseminate the output of these companies.   If AI is used improperly, whether consciously or not, all affected markets will be misled, manipulated, corrupted.

Timothy Wu, former presidential adviser and author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” claims that today’s actions against big tech and search engine platform dominance will be seen in the future as “all about who’s going to control artificial intelligence.”  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified at trial that her company used its powerful search engines to obtain consumer data to train their AI to make their search engines dominant.

FTC Chair Lina Khan has noted that  the AI field is “fast-moving” and that the FTC wants to assure “that the opportunity for competition and the potential for disruption are preserved, rather than this moment being co-opted by some of the existing dominant firms to double down on their dominance.”  Given the head-start of the giants, it is feared that all small AI companies of merit will be crushed, or will be sucked up into the giants to obtain their technology or to “capture and kill” competition.

The future here is unclear but, remember, the Government won the Google case and now we are awaiting what action will occur as remedy.  We are headed for interesting times, with impact not only on society and its commercial and political market-places but also with respect to your investment portfolio, the way in which new capital is deployed to tech companies, and how the next Administration will process all this– it is noted that during all the political battles this year, with all the hot-point political issues being debated, neither Presidential candidate has taken any specific position on tech antitrust.