It’s beyond obvious just how important digital technologies are to us in 2021. While it’s true that new players are emerging and growing, and sometimes reaching stratospheric valuations at warp speed, still it’s also true that digital technology remains the land of the giants.

Market analysts have even conjured an acronym to help us shorthand the tech titans – FAANG, that is, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google (now known as Alphabet – but why give up on a good acronym).

With great power comes great concern about the possible abuse of power by Big Tech. As this report from CNBC explains, in July 2019 the US Department of Justice (DoJ) launched a review of America’s biggest tech firms. The questions were simple – are these companies too big and did they get to be so big by subverting competition?

The DoJ reviews fall within US antitrust laws. The land of the free is not only home to an aggressive form of capitalism, but also periodically to robust regulators. We learn that the first antitrust laws go way, way, way back, back to 1890, with follow-up laws in 1914.

Just like now, the motivation was to prevent market leaders from using their dominance to stifle competition and to engage in practices that were detrimental to consumers.

The targets back then where John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age. Antitrust activity reached its peak in the decades after World War II, culminating in the breakup of AT&T in 1984 and the creation of the Baby Bells.

After hibernating for the past 40 years, it looks like the DoJ is joining regulators from countries and regions as distinct as China, the EU, India and Australia to consider if what happened to AT&T needs to happen to any or all of the FAANGs.

As the report says, it’s the alignment of political will with regulatory zeal that makes all the difference. And as for political will, that emerges from Switched ON voters demand that their politicians and regulators are as Switched ON as they are themselves.