Surveillance doesn’t cause monopolies, monopolies certainly abet surveillance.

Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect better treatment.

Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious interference, and patent.

Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web.

If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool cyberpunk novel.

Meanwhile, breaking up monopolies is something we seem to have forgotten how to do. There is a bipartisan, trans-Atlantic consensus that breaking up companies is a fool’s errand at best — liable to mire your federal prosecutors in decades of litigation — and counterproductive at worst, eroding the “consumer benefits” of large companies with massive efficiencies of scale.

But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world.

Trustbusting is hard. Breaking big companies into smaller ones is expensive and time-consuming. So time-consuming that by the time you’re done, the world has often moved on and rendered years of litigation irrelevant. From 1969 to 1982, the U.S. government pursued an antitrust case against IBM over its dominance of mainframe computing — but the case collapsed in 1982 because mainframes were being speedily replaced by PCs.

A future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to enforce the law as it was written.

It’s far easier to prevent concentration than to fix it, and reinstating the traditional contours of U.S. antitrust enforcement will, at the very least, prevent further concentration. That means bans on mergers between large companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.

These powers are all in the plain language of U.S. antitrust laws, so in theory, a future U.S. president could simply direct their attorney general to enforce the law as it was written. But after decades of judicial “education” in the benefits of monopolies, after multiple administrations that have packed the federal courts with lifetime-appointed monopoly cheerleaders, it’s not clear that mere administrative action would do the trick.