Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger. On today's show is Silicon Valley

Too Powerful? Our websites like Google and Facebook becoming monopolies. Do we need to break them up

or regulate them as utilities? Or what should we do about this, if anything? Should we be

afraid? Is this just much ado about nothing?

Well, joining me to discuss this is Mike Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist for the Progressive Policy Institute

and co-author of a recent report with Brett Swanson, The Coming Productivity Boom. Mike, thanks for joining.

Oh, very glad to be here, Evan.

So there was a New York Times op-ed which made a lot of noise called Is It Time to Break Up Google?

And essentially, they looked at the market share of various American tech companies.

They said, Google has 88% market share in search advertising.

And Facebook, if you include its subsidiaries like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, they own 77% of all mobile social traffic.

And then you've got Amazon with a 74% share in the e-book market.

And the author, who is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab, he says in classic economic terms, all three of these companies are monopolies.

Is he right?

I think he's grabbing the stick at the wrong end.

I've actually got a basic economics textbook that's in this third edition.

And, you know, what economics tells us is that the problem with companies with market power

is that they raise prices, they reduce supply, and they lower the welfare of people that way.

Now, actually, what Brett Swanson and I did in our report is we divided the economy into a digital

sector and a physical sector. So you've got the digital industries and the physical industries.

And what's fascinating is that the digital industries have much faster productivity growth

and much slower price growth and also much faster job growth. The physical industries have slower productivity

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