The Curse of Bigness

What happens when a few corporations become so large that they start acting like governments—dictating prices, swallowing competitors, and shaping public policy for their own gain? This is the unsettling question at the heart of Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Wu argues that excessive concentration of private power—and our society’s complacency toward it—has brought us to a new Gilded Age, eerily echoing the one that bred the monopolists of the late nineteenth century and paved the way for authoritarianism in the twentieth.

In short, Wu contends that unchecked bigness is not just an economic problem—it’s a political and moral one. When industries consolidate and corporations wield disproportionate influence, democracy itself falters. The book is a rallying cry to revive the forgotten spirit of antitrust law, not as mere technical regulation, but as a fundamental safeguard of liberty. Wu’s thesis combines history, law, and philosophy to reveal how “bigness” corrupts society, blunts innovation, manipulates politics, and endangers freedom.

The New Gilded Age

Wu begins with a look around us: massive tech platforms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook control the digital infrastructure through which modern life flows. They aren’t just businesses; they mediate speech, commerce, and community. This centralized power, Wu warns, mirrors the monopolies of old—Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the rail trusts—that justified their dominance under the banner of efficiency and progress.

Over the last forty years, a quiet ideological revolution—spearheaded by the Chicago School and jurists like Robert Bork—shrunk antitrust law to a narrow focus on consumer prices. If prices weren’t rising, regulators declared victory. But Wu shows how that blindness allowed companies to grow vast, not through innovation, but through acquisition and exclusion, creating markets where competition suffocates before it can begin.

The Link Between Concentration and Crisis

Wu ties the “curse of bigness” to broader social instability. From the original Gilded Age to the present, concentration breeds inequality, alienation, and the appeal of strongmen promising to restore fairness and control. The monopolists of the early 1900s helped give rise to fascist economies that wed political and corporate power—partnerships between Hitler and giants like I.G. Farben and Krupp illustrate how concentrated industry abetted dictatorship. Wu warns that history doesn’t repeat exactly, but the parallels are striking: when economic structures favor oligarchs, democratic legitimacy erodes.

Antitrust as a Moral and Constitutional Principle

Antitrust, for Wu, is not merely an economic tool; it’s a Constitutional-level safeguard. Louis Brandeis—the intellectual hero of this book—saw the antitrust laws as America’s commitment to open markets and dispersed power. Brandeis viewed corporate size as a moral question, equating oversized firms with slavery of a new kind: dependence and loss of dignity for ordinary citizens. Wu echoes Brandeis in arguing that antitrust law protects not just competition, but civic freedom—the ability of individuals and small enterprises to live without subjection to the “kingly prerogatives” of private empires.

Why the Fight Matters Now

Today's tech monopolies don’t just own products—they own systems of information and influence. Wu compares Google’s control over search, Facebook’s command over social discourse, and Amazon’s grip on commerce to the trusts that once dominated oil and steel. These firms’ “bigness,” he argues, jeopardizes everything from innovation to privacy to political discourse. Reviving antitrust law is not nostalgic; it’s necessary to prevent history’s darkest repetition—the union of corporate and authoritarian interests under the pretext of national progress.

Key Thought

As Wu reminds us, “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.” Antitrust, then, is democracy’s armor against private empires.

Wu’s message is both historical and urgent. The curse of bigness undermines democracy, equality, and liberty. To reverse the trend, he proposes a Neo-Brandeisian revival: bold enforcement, breakups when necessary, and a renewed commitment to the economic structure that sustains democracy itself. The rest of the book examines how bigness arose, the thinkers who fought it, and how we can reclaim the lost art of trust-busting.

Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice and reformer, is the philosophical anchor of Wu’s vision. Brandeis believed the real measure of an economy was its effect on human character and dignity. He warned that excessive corporate size wasn't just inefficient—it was corrosive to liberty and the soul of a democracy. Wu revives Brandeis as a thinker for our time, showing how his “right to live, and not merely to exist” connects economic justice to personal freedom.

The Louisville Ideal

Brandeis grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, among small businesses and community ties—a local economy where work connected directly to personal effort. This model of “economic democracy” shaped his belief that decentralized enterprise breeds civic virtue. When industrialization replaced small firms with monopolies, Brandeis saw not progress but moral decline: anonymous corporations turned workers into cogs, destroying the personal connection between effort and reward.

Character, Liberty, and Work

For Brandeis, your work was part of your moral development. He thought genuine freedom required economic independence—without it, people live at the mercy of “the arbitrary will of another.” Wu recounts how Brandeis opposed the New Haven Railroad’s monopoly led by J.P. Morgan, not only because it was inefficient but because it violated the moral right of individuals to build something of their own. When rail consolidation caused accidents, corruption, and exploitation, Brandeis saw it as proof that bigness breeds irresponsibility.

The Right to Live Fully

Brandeis defined the American ideal of liberty as the chance to flourish—to “develop one’s faculties naturally and healthily.” That required limits on private dominance and protection of conditions enabling meaningful life: fair wages, education, leisure, and creative work. He argued for labor laws, child protection, and antitrust enforcement to preserve “industrial liberty.” Wu uses Brandeis’s framework to argue that our definition of freedom today remains hollow unless we confront economic coercion, not just political oppression.

A Modern Relevance

Brandeis distrusted both big business and big government, favoring human-scaled institutions. In tech monopolies controlling the data of billions, Wu sees exactly what Brandeis warned against: corporate empires making the individual dependent and shaping the conditions of life itself. Modern “industrial slavery,” Wu suggests, may look like algorithms determining work hours, medical insurance, or even speech. In our era, reclaiming Brandeis’s vision means ensuring that technology serves human flourishing rather than dominating it.

Wu traces the origins of corporate monopoly to the late nineteenth century’s “Trust Movement,” when industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan reshaped the economy from competition to consolidation. These men gave themselves divine justification for domination: monopoly was not greed—it was “the survival of the fittest.” Wu’s detailed narrative reveals how this mindset took root and why it continues to seduce modern executives.

The Religion of Bigness

Morgan and Rockefeller viewed consolidation as evolution’s next stage—Social Darwinism turned into economic theology. As Herbert Spencer’s philosophy spread, monopoly became a moral good, rewarding the strong and eliminating the weak. Rockefeller’s notorious “American Beauty Rose” metaphor—where the finest bloom requires “sacrificing the early buds”—summed up this ethic of industrial eugenics.

The Birth of Antitrust Resistance

The monopolists justified their empires with efficiency claims, arguing competition was “ruinous.” Wu notes how this logic reappears in Silicon Valley’s defense of dominance today (Peter Thiel famously calls competition “for losers”). But the Trust era provoked massive backlash—strikes, populist movements, and eventually, legislation. The Sherman Act of 1890 outlawed monopoly and declared the market a domain of freedom, capping decades of public outrage against “kingly prerogatives” in business.

Private Empires vs. a Democratic Republic

Wu connects the rise of the trusts to a constitutional crisis: the founders never anticipated private actors wielding power comparable to the state. By 1900, Morgan’s steel and rail monopolies controlled entire sectors, bribing legislators and dictating policy. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, America’s cultural tradition of small, independent producers collided with a new aristocracy of capital. The result? A deep questioning of who truly ruled—the people or the trusts.

Wu’s insight is that the Trust Movement didn’t die; it evolved. Today’s network monopolies justify themselves using the same arguments—progress, efficiency, inevitability—cloaked this time in digital rhetoric. His warning: whenever industries claim moral entitlement to total control, democracy must intervene or risk degeneration into oligarchy.

Theodore Roosevelt transformed antitrust enforcement from symbolic law into political power. Wu vividly recounts how Roosevelt faced down titans like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, proving that even the mightiest corporations were not above the law. Roosevelt’s “trustbusting” turned antitrust into a Constitutional check—an assertion that government must control private empires to preserve democracy.

The Northern Securities Case

When Roosevelt sued Morgan’s Northern Securities railroad monopoly in 1902, the press dubbed him the “trustbuster.” Morrison’s account shows how the Supreme Court agreed to dismantle Morgan’s empire, restoring the principle that monopolies offend the Constitution’s spirit. Roosevelt’s confrontation—“We don’t want to fix it up; we want to stop it”—symbolized a democratic awakening: private power must bow to the public interest.

The Battle Against Standard Oil

Wu’s retelling of Roosevelt’s push to break up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil reads like epic drama. Armed with journalist Ida Tarbell’s exposé revealing bribery and sabotage, Roosevelt’s government prosecuted Standard Oil for cartel behavior and predatory exclusion. In 1911, the company was split into thirty-four parts—including Exxon, Chevron, and Mobil—ironically making shareholders richer afterward. The case reaffirmed that the economy’s purpose is not monopoly efficiency but dispersed opportunity.

Political Antitrust and Democracy

For Roosevelt and Wu alike, antitrust was political, not purely economic. Too much concentration means policy captured by corporations. Through anecdotes like the pharmaceutical industry lobbying Congress to ban Medicare price negotiation (a 77,500% investment return), Wu shows how concentrated industries warp democracy. Roosevelt’s antifascist foresight—“Aggregated wealth demands what is unfair”—underscored that democracy stands or falls on whether government retains the courage to act against private kings.

By mid-twentieth century, antitrust law was revered as democracy’s guardian. Wu calls this era “Peak Antitrust”—when breaking up monopolies was a matter of national pride and moral duty. But by the 1970s, a counter-revolution led by the University of Chicago redefined antitrust as an efficiency game, focused only on price. This intellectual shift gutted the law’s spirit and enabled today’s empire-sized corporations.

Antitrust as a Shield Against Fascism

After World War II, leaders understood monopoly’s danger from witnessing fascist regimes’ corporate alliances. Germany’s I.G. Farben cartel became Hitler’s industrial backbone. American lawmakers responded with the Celler–Kefauver Act of 1950, an anti-merger law meant to stop concentration before it began. Senator Estes Kefauver warned that letting corporations control economic life “either results in a Fascist state or a Socialist state”—his reminder that too much power always ends in tyranny or nationalization.

The Chicago School Revolution

Economists Aaron Director and Robert Bork launched a radical reinterpretation: that antitrust should serve only “consumer welfare.” If prices stayed low, monopoly was fine. Wu highlights Bork’s audacious claim that Congress in 1890 intended this minimal standard—an argument unsupported by any historical record but warmly embraced by judges eager for simplicity. Bork’s influence turned legal culture toward laissez-faire economics, recasting regulators as meddlers in efficient markets.

The Death of Economic Citizenship

Wu laments that under this regime, law ceased defending democratic equality. Courts began citing Bork as gospel, claiming monopoly “is an important element of the free market system.” (Justice Scalia’s 2004 opinion in Trinko exemplifies this worship of monopoly as innovation’s driver.) As a result, the checks against concentrated economic power vanished. Wu calls this the death of “economic citizenship” —our collective power to shape markets democratically.

Today’s monopolies wear hoodies instead of top hats. Wu’s final historical arc describes how Big Tech resurrected the old trusts in digital form. The early internet promised perpetual renewal—no company could dominate for long. Yet by the 2010s, Google, Amazon, and Facebook cemented unassailable control, buying competitors, cloning rivals, and exploiting data to lock in dominance.

From Chaos to Consolidation

The web’s early promise was decentralization: startups like Netscape, MySpace, and Altavista rose and fell at lightning speed. Then the survivors—Google, Amazon, and Facebook—found ways to make dominance permanent. Facebook purchased its emerging rivals Instagram ($1 billion) and WhatsApp ($19 billion), neutralizing threats to its empire. Regulators waved the deals through, unable to see that these platforms competed for user attention and data—the true currency of the digital economy.

Monopoly by Acquisition and Cloning

Like Rockefeller buying refineries, tech giants swallowed innovation. Google acquired YouTube, AdMob, and Waze; Amazon absorbed Diapers.com and Zappos; Facebook cloned Snapchat’s features and crushed competition. Wu points out how these tactics mirror old monopolies but rely on modern ignorance: regulators trained in Bork’s price theory missed that “free” digital services extract payment through data and behavioral control, not dollars.

The Moral Defense of Monopolies Returns

Wu exposes the ideology behind modern monopoly worship: tech leaders like Peter Thiel call competition obsolete, urging founders to pursue “monopoly profits.” These libertarian philosophies resurrect the Social Darwinism of Spencer and Rockefeller. Facebook insists it “brings the world closer together,” Google frames dominance as altruism (“to organize the world’s information”), and Amazon claims customer obsession justifies empire. Wu unmasks these narratives as moral cover for economic absolutism.

Modern Trusts in Disguise

Wu concludes that we’ve come full circle: once again, industries are dominated by giants claiming benevolent purpose while hoarding wealth and political power. The digital age didn’t end monopoly—it perfected it.

Wu concludes with an agenda—a roadmap to restore antitrust to its democratic purpose. He calls this program “Neo-Brandeisian,” grounded in the belief that markets serve citizens, not corporations. Reclaiming antitrust means reviving enforcement, breaking up entrenched monopolies, and redefining success as preservation of competitive freedom rather than price control.

Reforming Merger Review

Wu’s first step is stopping the merger flood before it drowns competition. He proposes stricter standards for large mergers (over $6 billion), transparency for review processes, and public comment provisions. He urges blocking mergers that reduce major competitors below four, restoring Congress’s original anti-merger intent of 1950. Behind these reforms lies a simple moral idea: citizens deserve to know when industries are being quietly fused into oligarchies.

Reviving the Big Case Tradition

Wu demands a return to “battleship” prosecutions—large cases targeting industry-spanning monopolists, just as Roosevelt’s were. Breakups, he argues, work: Standard Oil’s dissolution enriched shareholders; AT&T’s breakup unleashed the internet; Microsoft’s antitrust defeat preserved digital diversity. The fear of big cases stems not from their failure but from political timidity. They remain the most effective scalpel for restoring economic dynamism.

Protecting the Competitive Process

The Neo-Brandeisian doctrine replaces Bork’s “consumer welfare” focus with Brandeis’s simpler test: does conduct promote or suppress competition? Markets don’t need to be engineered for perfect efficiency; they need freedom to breathe. Protecting the process—not just prices—reignites new businesses, innovation, and resistance to concentration. Wu stresses that this approach fulfills Congress’s intent and aligns with democracy’s constitutional spirit.

Democracy Over Efficiency

Finally, Wu reframes antitrust as moral politics, not pure economics. Power must be limited, whether it comes from presidents or corporations. His Neo-Brandeisian vision imagines a society where individuals can build, produce, and thrive without dependency on monopolists. The fight for antitrust, he insists, is the fight for liberty itself.