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Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Facebook are the five most valuable public companies in the world.
The big five are amassing incredible market power even outside their core businesses: Amazon is the third-largest digital ad platform, and Apple’s Services business would be No. 66 on the Fortune 500 if it were its own company.
And now politicians on the left and right are calling for the federal government to investigate these tech giants. This is the summer the Justice Department is expected to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google for its dominance in digital ads and search.
To see where Americans stand on breaking up Big Tech, Fortune and SurveyMonkey polled 1,276 U.S. adults between June 25 and 26.*
More than half of U.S. adults (65%) want the feds to investigate at least one tech firm for antitrust, but the public can’t agree on which tech company. A third of them (29%) want Google to be investigated. Facebook (48%) and Amazon (31%) received the highest percentage of U.S. adults calling for them to be investigated, but those are far from a full sweep.
The majority of the country (53%) isn’t ready to see the federal government break up a big tech firm. However, 46% want to see at least one big tech firm broken up. Facebook leads the group, at 27%. But that still indicates barely over 1 in 4 U.S. adults who named the company. It was followed by Amazon (21%), Alphabet/Google (16%), and Apple (14%). Meanwhile, Microsoft had only 12% of U.S. adults calling for it to be broken up.
The public is not gung ho about breaking up big tech companies. Then again, the DOJ doesn’t necessarily need public sign-off. Just look at its case against beloved Microsoft in the 1990s.
*Methodology: The Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll was conducted among a national sample of 1,276 adults in the U.S. between June 25–26. This survey’s modeled error estimate is plus or minus 4 percentage points. The findings have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography.
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