Tech giants seem invincible. That worries lawmakers

In the technology industry, the sharks have never long been safe from the minnows. Over much of the last 40 years, the biggest players in tech — from IBM to Hewlett-Packard to Cisco to Yahoo — were eventually outmaneuvered by start-ups that came out of nowhere.

The dynamic is so dependable that it is often taken to be a kind of axiom. To grow large in this business is also to grow slow, blind and dumb, to become closed off from the very sources of innovation that turned you into a shark in the first place.

Then, in the last half decade,