Tim Wu who penned “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, has a new book coming out in November called "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age".

In it, he argues for a return to aggressive antitrust enforcement in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, saying that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and other huge tech companies are a threat to democracy as they get bigger and bigger.

He said it was a myth that it was “not American” to break up companies which had become too big.

"We live in America [I don't.ed]  which has a strong and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big for inefficient reasons. We need to reverse this idea that it's not an American tradition. We've broken up dozens of companies."

"I think if you took a hard look at the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, the argument that the effects of those acquisitions have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a number of reasons," says Wu.

“Breaking up the company wouldn't be hard. What would be the harm? You'll have three competitors. It's not 'Oh my god, if you get rid of WhatsApp and Instagram, well then the whole world's going to fall apart. It would be like 'Okay, now you have some companies actually trying to offer you an alternative to Facebook.'"

Breaking up Facebook - and other huge tech companies like Google and Amazon - could be simple under the current law, suggests Wu.

But it could also lead to a major rethinking of how antitrust law should work in a world where the giant platform companies give their products away for free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate power seems to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think seriously about the conditions that create innovation.

"I think everyone's steering way away from the monopolies, and I think it's hurting innovation in the tech sector", Wu said.