Their Yalta moment took place, appropriately enough, at an invitation-only meeting of the world’s top antitrust enforcers in mid-May. As attendees at the Cartagena, Colombia, conference debated competition policy in a digital economy, Makan Delrahim, chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Joe Simons, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, divided four of the five largest U.S. tech companies between them.
After eight months of emails and discussion and decades of laissez-faire policy, they were ready to put Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google under the antitrust microscope, according to a person familiar with the matter. That decision, echoing the ...
