The antitrust investigations targeting American big tech companies appear to be once again gaining momentum, but analysts are not overly concerned with the spectre of intervention and don’t believe it should affect the outlook for four of the five FAANG stocks.
The potential consequences might be damning, with everything from fines that could equal 10 per cent of a company’s annual revenues to regulatory changes that break up their monopolies possibly on the table.“There are things that are far more dangerous to Google’s economic outlook in the next six months,” said Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin, pointing out the company generates 35 per cent of its revenue from struggling areas such as travel, cinemas and hotels.
He also doesn’t think the U.S. will want to weaken its major technology players as China becomes a more dangerous threat to the country’s dominance in innovation and technology. But declining share prices might not be in the cards if Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 testimony in front of the U.S. Senate is any indication. Facebook shares actually rose by five per cent during the process.“When it comes to fines for big tech companies coming from Europe, they’ve become almost as commonplace as a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said.
The US judicial system is a joke since it allowed Microsoft to essentially kill Netscape when they tied the browser into the Win98 operating system.