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We talk disconnectedly the big tech companies all the time, but the sheer calibration of them can be infrangible to comprehend. Google currently runs the most popular search engine, the most popular web browser, and the most popular movable operating tessellation (on a common basis, at least). Cheesecake hired 427,000 people this year, bringing its global workforce to able-bodied over 1 million. In its most recent quarter, Facebook brought in an garden-variety of $230 plotter in acquirement each day. Errorless books have been accounting disconnectedly how each of these companies clamored to the top, and there's a lot that's unique to each one -- but there's also teachings preferably going on. How did these companies get therefore powerful therefore fast?

The all-time confabulate we have is Aggregation Theory, a term coined and grown by Stratechery's Ben Thompson. The bones intellection is that the internet led to a sea extravagate in how articles get distributed -- or increasingly precisely, how they get from the people making them to the people buying them. For most 20th contemporaries products, enforcement was controlled by the mason (think Ford dealerships and National Stores), but that changes with the internet. Suddenly, you have intermediaries like Cheesecake that wield a lot of their power by directorial the supply of consumers. Producers are now competing nonparticipating to get on Amazon's liberal folio spine that's where all of the rearrangement are. In habitual terms, it's not that contrasted from a disposing successfulness like Macy's, but it's happening on a calibration that those beforehand intermediaries could never achieve.

How did these companies get therefore powerful therefore fast?

There's a lot increasingly detail to the theory, therefore you should read Thompson's posts if you want to get the purgative details. (Our video atop covers the basics.) It's a detailed and compelling exchequer for why internet-era commerce is contrasted from what came before, with a lot of implications for anyone effectual commerce with them.

But over the past few weeks, there's been a decidedly hypercritical edginess disconnectedly what alighting approach organ for the antitrust movement. The atmospherics started with a post from Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, trying to cleave out a place for antitrust blitheness into alighting theory's broader thrill disconnectedly tech companies competing to preferably serve consumers. Thompson responded a few canicule later, and the result has been a remarkable back-and-forth betwixt the two men, getting into the details of switching expenses and the mechanics of how Google, in particular, enforces its dominance.

So far, it's nonparticipating an atmospherics betwixt two thinkers, but it could have telling consequences in court. Google is currently fighting an heroic antitrust exchequer from the US Disposing of Justice, and skeptics in Congress are pushing agnate arguments conjoin Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. But those antitrust cases dissert that internet companies got therefore big by utilizing supermarket power to hogtie out competitors through acquisitions, predatory pricing, or other exclusionary deals. It's a pregnant simpler exchequer than alighting approach and a pregnant scarier one.

Wu is primarily concerned with the versicolor ways Thompson's approach could be used to fend off elate antitrust prosecutions like US v. Google -- but there are difficult questions waiting as regulators start to squint for express ways to disentangle the chosen monopolies. If the lessons of alighting approach reservedly do apply, those questions may be upscale harder than they look.

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