Facebook and Google have argued that breaking them up would damage US competitiveness with China. Vanderbilt Law Professor — and former advisor to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — Ganesh Sitaraman and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler (now at the Brookings Institution) take exception. Sitaraman argues in Foreign Affairs that breaking up Big Tech companies would bolster US national security. Wheeler writes that US tech innovation would improve if Big Tech companies were required to make their data assets available to rivals.

It is an open question how regulation might affect whatever competition there might be between the US and China, but Sitaraman and Wheeler are wrong. Sitaraman seems unaware of the five decades of academic research showing that market structure — the number and relative sizes of firms in a market or industry — does not determine the amount of innovation. Wheeler also seems unaware of how markets for ideas work. Here are my explanations.

Read Dr. Mark Jamison’s full blog post online at AEI.