Microsoft has also come under scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in the US for its “dealings” with startup Inflection AI, which may also contravene antitrust laws, said Mark Lemley and Matt Wansley in The New York Times. Microsoft has “defended” its deal, but it has raised questions about whether the Big Tech firms are now too big to allow new companies to flourish, forgetting that “it is competition – not consolidation – that delivers technological progress”.

Indeed, the Big Tech firms were “once small start-ups themselves”, added Lemley and Wansley, but they are now “old”, and instead of “innovating”, they have “learned to stop the cycle of disruption”. They do this by investing in start-ups, giving them “intelligence about competitive threats and the ability to influence the start-ups’ direction”.