Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc.

It’s the “end of history” argument, but applied to business and economics. One undercurrent in the resurgence of antitrust enthusiasm is the idea that America’s most valuable technology companies — Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, AlphabetGoogle, and Facebook (listed here in order of market value) — are “The Forever Companies,” as CNN tech journalist Dylan Byers has labeled them.

Of course, being big and powerful one day doesn’t guarantee that status tomorrow. During their heyday, General Motors (1928), IBM (1970), and DuPont (1955) towered over Corporate America in a way Big Tech doesn’t come close to approaching. And, sure, those companies are still around and are still important. But no one’s writing “Forever Company” articles about them. They’re just not relevant in the same way.

So how might this current crop of tech titans avoid the same fate? When in doubt about a business question these days, answer “AI.” In a new McKinsey Global Institute report, researchers argue that early adopters of artificial intelligence — such as Big Tech — may be developing an “insurmountable advantage” over rivals. Already companies that classify themselves as automation and AI focused tend to report better financial performance than their peers. Moreover, MGI expects the flywheel to keep spinning faster as their expertise grows, as they reinvest their gains, and as they are able to attract top talent. And while MGI is not just limiting their analysis to Big Tech, one can see how it would apply most strongly to them given their ability to hoover up data, talent, and promising new firms.

So maybe this time is different because of, you know, AI. But strong claims require strong evidence. And in this case, the historical evidence at least argues for caution when making these claims. “Technology markets abound with examples of firms wiped away by technological disruption,” notes competition researcher Nicolas Petit in his paper “Technology Giants, ‘The Moligopoly Hypothesis,’ and Holistic Competition: A Primer.” Petit:

Think of the demise of Kodak, a well-known monopolist of the 20th century; of famous web portals such as AOL, Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo! and MySpace; or of the predicaments of once-mighty mobile handset makers such as Motorola, Nokia or RIM (the maker of the Blackberry). . . . Even deeper than this, great innovative prowess is not synonymous of market clout, as evidenced by the poor competitive performance of IBM’s gigantic R&D programme or Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

And here is perhaps Silicon Valley’s favorite economist, W. Brian Arthur, making the same point on a recent a16z podcast episode:

Eventually what happens in an increasing returns market is that the next invention comes along, and some other company comes to dominate. And you can dominate for a while in one large niche in the digital economy but then the next set of technologies come in and new players come in with that. Google recognizes this, and Google is trying to stay ahead by being in on the new technologies. But companies don’t always make that transition from one technology to the next very well. Apple has been very lucky. They invented some of the technologies, and they’re able to surf on that new board, so to speak. Lock-ins tend to last a certain amount of time and then they become obsolete and some new game comes along.

As Arthur points out, Big Tech CEOs know the risks. They’re paranoid about their future. They’ve all read Clayton Christensen’s work on innovation and disruption. They’re not assuming they are Forever Companies. Far from it. Indeed, Petit has attempted to document their fears by looking at what tech firms do (invest a lot in R&D, including long-shot bets) and what they say, especially in SEC filings. So maybe these companies can avoid disruption or displacement.

Maybe. But it would be imprudent given the historical evidence to assume they can and then employ that assumption when arguing we need to preemptively dismantle or regulate them, pre-crime style, when they are innovating hard and providing massive consumer value within their dominant core businesses. Indeed, some attempts at regulation, such as the EU’s new Global Data Protection Rule, may even cement Big Tech’s incumbency. Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans is excellent on this issue, so I will give him the last word via a Twitter tweetstorm compilation:

It’s a basic feature of the free market that dominant companies tend not to last. They fail, or are overtaken, or become irrelevant. It’s also a basic feature of the free market that sometimes you need state intervention to address this. “Market failure.” The difference in tech is that the cycle time can be really fast — we went from IBM to Wintel to [Google-Apple-Amazon-Facebook] in 20 year jumps. That has tended to mean dominance turns to irrelevance faster than antitrust processes can diagnose, pick a remedy, and apply it. Hence MSFT lost its dominance because of mobile, but antitrust didn’t do that (not indeed cause the failure of Blackberry or Nokia). And who cares about Microsoft Money now?

In many other industries, the market matured and dominance is entrenched for generations. Once Standard Oil won, that was it. But tech isn’t mature, and probably won’t be in any of our lifetimes. It’s as though solar overturned hydrocarbons in the 1920. Finally, even if you are convinced we need action against Facebook or Amazon right now, it’s not entirely clear what that is. “Break them up!” makes good headlines but literally no sense. These companies aren’t bundles. That makes things like GDPR more interesting, as changing the dynamics of a space rather than trying to cut the newsfeed into pieces. The irony is that GDPR’s most obvious effects are to strengthen the incumbents.