And Yang was roundly criticized by the experts on this matter for making that dumbass statement. Referring to the age of antitrust laws as an argument for why they should no longer be utilized is so ludicrous as to not warrant rebuttal. Should we no longer enforce any laws that are more than 50 years old? Also, you have it backward. The whole point of antitrust efforts is to stop people from being forced to use one single company/product like we are right now. Right now, you don't have a real choice in search engine, you have to use Google. You don't have a real choice in social network, you have to use Facebook or one of its subsidiaries. They control the market. Breaking up Facebook would mean I have three choices in social media instead of one. Breaking up Google means that I'm not forced into feeding the Google Bundle (YouTube, Nest, Chrome, etc) every time I use their search engine, which would create more space for other search engines to emerge.
The internet is in fact like telecom and oil in that they're all critical industries that are heavily concentrated. They all featured companies with monopolistic strangleholds on their markets, and just like telecom and oil, breaking up big tech would produce large gains in social progress, technological advancement, and economic benefits.
Your regionality argument is half-cooked. AT&T and Standard Oil were geographically-organized entities in geographically-dependent industries, hence why they were broken up along geographic lines. Creating Facebook NorthEast and Facebook SouthWest would be a nonsensical way to organize antitrust action against Facebook, unless the government starts rationing internet access based on region, because Facebook and the internet are not regionally based entities in that way. Digital space is just as relevant as geographic space in this century. You gotta update your thinking. What needs to happen is big tech firms - and concentrated firms across the entire economy - need to have their (illegal btw) horizontal and vertical acquisitions forcefully divested because they're creating harmful network effects and hoarding value creation, which would allow for more breathing room for new companies and products in the digital space. As Warren says, Amazon can either be the empire or a team in the realm of online retail, not both. Facebook cannot hold a social media monopoly by owning Instagram and Whatsapp. Google cannot have their search monopoly give their other product lines an undue advantage. A lot of it comes down to advertising though. Breaking these companies up would break the strangehold they have on advertising, which would lead to a healthier journalism environment, which would lead to a healthier civic society.
Corny ass hot take breh.