Breaking Away sounds a warning call alerting readers that their privacy and autonomy concerns are indeed warranted, and the remedies deserve far greater attention than they have received from our leading policymakers and experts to date. Through the various prisms of economic theory, market data, policy, and law, the book offers a clear and accessible insight into how a few powerful firms - Google, Apple, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon - have used the same anticompetitive playbook and manipulated the current legal regime for their gain at our collective expense. While much has been written about these four companies' power, far less has been said about addressing their risks. In looking at the proposals to date, however, policymakers and scholars have not fully addressed three fundamental issues: First, will more competition necessarily promote our privacy and well-being? Second, who owns the personal data, and is that even the right question? Third, what are the policy implications if personal data is non-rivalrous? Breaking Away not only articulates the limitations of the current enforcement and regulatory approach but offers concrete proposals to promote competition, without having to sacrifice our privacy. This book explores how these platforms accumulated their power, why the risks they pose are far greater than previously believed, and why the tools need to be far more robust than what is being proposed. Policymakers, scholars, and business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs seeking to compete and innovate in the digital platform economy will find the book an invaluable source of information.

"A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition." -Fast Company Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking expose invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being. "We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States." -Science "A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with." -Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal "A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism's potential for malfeasance." -John Naughton, The Observer