There’s a difference between protectionism and political will
Competition regulators in the EU, the UK and the US are all looking hard at concentration in the tech sector, and well they should: an industry that was once hailed for its dynamism — for being a sector where yesterday’s world-spanning titans are sold for parts to companies that were mere napkin doodles a year or two before — has calcified into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
The reasons for tech concentration are pretty straightforward. Despite a lot of fatalistic tech exceptionalism about “network effects” leading to inevitable monopolization, the actual means by which tech companies consolidated is actually easy to see in the historical record.