Tech tariffs? A brewing conflict with the European Union and within the Trump administration

That prompted free market tech advocates to express skepticism that the Trump administration would back away from the heavy-handed enforcement of regulations.

“They do not seem to have any trouble with the cognitive dissonance between that goal and their continued antitrust grudge match against Big Tech,” Josh Withrow, a technology and innovation fellow at the R Street Institute, told me.

What bothered Withrow was that so-called small-government conservatives now echo the “fundamentally progressive idea that private power is somehow equal to or worse than the danger posed by government power.”

And while it’s true that Big Tech is composed of incredibly large companies, Withrow pointed out that they got that large because of the popularity of their products. “Those same economies of scale are also why private U.S. companies are at the leading edge of revolutionary technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” he said.