Fifteen years on, perhaps the most pertinent takeaway from Microsoft's antitrust battles with both the United States and Europe is how little it mattered. From a financial perspective, Microsoft grew revenue unimpeded from $15 billion in 1998 when the case was initiated to $95 billion last year.

Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets.

European governments are not alone in wondering how to deal with digital giants.

Jeff Bezos’ company is not the problem with American capitalism. It’s the solution to our economy’s ills.

The United States is much less a nation of entrepreneurs than it was a generation ago. This report suggests that the decline of small businesses is owed, at least in part, to anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations.

At some point in a big, successful company's life, it comes up against the problem of the law of large numbers. In the simplest terms, a fast-growing company can't keep growing at the same fast rate forever. It eventually has to slow down.

Following its mammoth deal in China, the company has an even tighter grip on ride-sharing. It may be time for antitrust officials to step in.

We describe a simple initial indicator of whether a proposed merger between rivals in a differentiated product industry is likely to raise prices through unilateral effects. Our diagnostic calibrates upward pricing pressure (UPP) resulting from the merger, based on the price/cost margins of the merging firms’ products and the extent of direct substitution between them.

In September, 2014, after investing in a ride-sharing company called Sidecar, Richard Branson declared that it was "early days and, like a lot of other commodity businesses, there is room for innovators on great customer experiences." He added that he was not putting his money into a "winner-takes-all market."

Can we prevent successful digital platforms like airbnb and Uber from taking excessive profits and abusing their strong market positions without missing out on the considerable benefits that these 21st century style monopolies offer? If so, better that social entrepreneurs and business insiders do it versus the government, writes author Felix Barber.

The application of big data, new algorithms, and cloud computing will change the nature of work and the structure of the economy. But the exact nature of that change will be determined by the social, political, and business choices we make.

There's an article in the"NY Times" Sunday Business Section today that lays out a very important question we have all been dancing around but will increasingly be dealing with. The article is nominally about Amazon's fight with Hachette but it is really about internet platforms and monopolies.

"The opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors."

The digital revolution was supposed to create an age of empowered microentrepreneurship, with power devolving to the masses. Instead, we've got the new Robber Barons : Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, with Uber and a few others trying to join this profitable circle of global oligopolies.

It's too big. It's cannibalizing the economy. It's time for a radical plan.

In arabian stories, the Genie is a magic spirit that has powers to do things for you. But if you let it out of the bottle, you can't control it anymore and bad things can happen. I like to think of this story when I think about startups and technologies that have the potential to be big game changers.

Don’t assume the new entrant in your market is a disruption. Learn to recognize different types of threats and design the best strategic response.