Is it time to break up the tech giants such as Facebook? | Larry Elliott

Amazon, Facebook and Google are as dominant as Standard Oil and AT&T were. But breaking them up is not going to be easy

In the first decade of the 20th century, Standard Oil was as mighty as the tech giants of Silicon Valley are today. The company had grown from a single refinery in Cleveland in 1863 to produce 87% of all US refined oil output. In 1911, the supreme court decided that Standard Oil was in breach of anti-trust legislation passed by Congress and ordered that the company be broken up.

Even before the data mining revelations that have engulfed Facebook, there was pressure in the US for similar action to be taken against the social media networking site and two other globally dominant companies - Google and Amazon - that have come from nowhere in the past two decades.

(June 14, 1911) Standard Oil broken up