(San Francisco)

Big tech companies have had an incredible decade, but that may be about to go the way of Wall Street, and not the post-Glass Steagall Wall Street, more like post Dodd-Frank Wall Street. Regulatory inquiries and fines against Big Tech are starting to pile up, and while the actual fines are tolerable given the companies’ massive profitability, the real change that could hurt them is structural. All the regulatory inquiries have forced tech companies to load up on compliance and related staff—Facebook’s employee count has surged from 6,000 six years ago to 35,000 today. Margins at Google have fallen considerably too. All of that is happening at the same time as top line growth is inevitably slowing because of the size of the businesses.

FINSUM: We think Big Tech might be at the very beginning of the end of its golden age.