The plucky firms that are beating big tech

BIG TECHSPAIeU keeps getting bigger. So far this year the combined market value of America’s five digital behemoths—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—has soared by half, to around $9trn. That is almost a quarter of the total for the & 500, an index of America’s largest companies (which has risen by just 17% in the period). The five account for almost 60% of sales, profits and spending on research and development of all the technology firms in the index. They are widely expected to be the main winners from the artificial-intelligence () revolution.Governments view this dominance with increasing trepidation. On September 12th America’s Department of Justice began a with Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet, in the biggest antitrust case in two decades, accusing it of abusing its internet-search monopoly). This month an law labelled the big five as digital “gatekeepers”, which bars them from bundling some services and discriminating against third parties on their platforms, among other things. The giants have grown so gigantic, the world’s trustbusters argue, that they suck all the oxygen out of the tech ecosystem, driving challengers to extinction or, at best, making it hard for anyone else to prosper. Just ask Snap, Spotify or Zoom.