The political attack against the ‘big tech’ can benefit the medium

Big tech being in the eye of antitrust may benefit smaller rivals. The acquisitions of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, giants worth a combined $ 5.5 trillion, are under scrutiny, making it more likely that they will pass on good deals that might otherwise have been tempting. This gives its smaller, more restrained competitors a shot at combat, shaking up lucrative sectors like cloud computing.

For years, US regulators have turned a blind eye to big tech deals, like Facebook’s $ 1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012. That recently put the country’s Democratic members of Congress in a state of mind. shaking. A scathing report by the House subcommittee, released earlier this month, recommended strengthening antitrust laws so that regulators can presumably block mergers from potential rivals or fledgling competitors.

A Democratic sweep of Congress in the Nov. 3 election would make that possible, and create an opportunity for under-the-radar technology companies like Oracle of $ 183 billion. The company founded by Larry Ellison has already taken advantage of antitrust scrutiny, offering to buy a minority stake in the Chinese-owned video app TikTok. Big rivals like Facebook and Google, which were accused of antitrust violations in a US government lawsuit filed this week, were virtually vetoed.

This could help Oracle on the next great technology frontier: cloud computing. Telecommuting has made online services for data storage, servers and networks even more popular. The global cloud computing market is expected to double in five years to $ 830 billion, according to research firm Markets and Markets. A secondary benefit of the TikTok deal is that Oracle would replace Google as a cloud service provider, giving it a high-profile selling point to increase its market share, currently a paltry 2%.

A moratorium on Big Tech deals could also help IBM, which recently announced a divestiture to focus on the cloud. Last year, the $ 112 billion company bought Red Hat for a whopping $ 34 billion as part of that gamble. Salesforce, SAP, and VMWare are also making inroads in the cloud computing market.

In August, Reuters reported that Amazon was in talks to acquire a minority stake in cloud service provider Rackspace Technology. The new report from the Democrats suggests that such an operation may not be so easy to do. If you resist (or stop), a boring tech company could be ready and waiting.