Taming Big Tech: Battles are raging on more than one front

The profitability of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple (MAMAA), twice the S&P 500 average of 10 per cent, has come to be seen as flowing from the abuse of market power, writes T N Ninan

Battles against Big Tech (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Apple, or MAMAA) aren’t new. But they have reached a defining moment. Earlier this month, two possibly epochal cases got under way in the US against Alphabet (Google) and Amazon — the biggest since action against Microsoft in 1998. In Europe, meanwhile, hefty fines running into billions of euros have already been imposed on tech companies in at least three instances. Now a “revolutionary” law has been passed and another unveiled this week, giving customers the freedom to decide what apps they want and delete pre-loaded software, and enabling more competition