VCs to antitrust officials: We’d rather take our chances than see tech regulated

Last week at Stanford, antitrust officials from the U.S. Department of Justice organized a day-long conference that engaged numerous venture capitalists in conversations about big tech. The DOJ wanted to hear from VCs about whether they believe there's still an opportunity for startups to flourish alongside the likes of Facebook and Google and whether they can anticipate what - if anything - might disrupt the inexorable growth of these giants.

Most of the invited panelists acknowledged there is a problem, but they also said fairly uniformly that they doubted if more regulation was the solution.

Some of the speakers dismissed outright the idea that today's tech incumbents can't be outmaneuvered. Sequoia's Michael Moritz talked about various companies that ruled the world across different decades and later receded into the background, suggesting that we merely need to wait and see which startups will eventually displace today's giants.

He added that if there's a real threat lurking anywhere, it isn't in an overly powerful Google, but rather American high schools that are, according to Moritz, a poor match for their Chinese counterparts. "We're killing ourselves; we're killing the future technologists" we're slowly killing the potential for home-brewed invention."

Renowned angel investor Ram Shriram similarly downplayed the DOJ's concerns, saying specifically he didn't think that "search" as a category could never be again disrupted or that it doesn't benefit from network effects. He observed that Google itself disrupted numerous search companies when it emerged on the scene in 1998.

Somewhat cynically, we would note that those companies - Lycos, Yahoo, Excite - had a roughly four-year lead over Google at the time, and Google has been massively dominant for nearly all of those 22 years (because of, yes, its network effects).