The Great War, Part 2: The Internet vs the Free Market This is the second part to a series of posts on this topic. Scroll to the end to find the most recent posts. In January of 2016 [1], Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times of the companies he called the “Frightful Five”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Manjoo’s writing was at the early stages of what has become a breaking wave of public and policymaker agita. Companies universally beloved only a few years ago have witnessed a dramatic turn, with conservatives and liberals alike criticizing the companies for their technical decisions, employment practices, business models and, well, pretty much everything else. As a result, we’ve seen bipartisan antitrust suits against Google and Facebook and a substantial interest in new legislation. Trust has broken down, and in its wake we are likely to see new law; to what extent that law produces constructive and pro-competitive outcomes remains an open question.