> big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running
The career officials in the Obama FTC started proceedings for an antitrust lawsuit against Google over a decade ago.
The political appointees (of both parties) shut it down.
It seems to me that regulatory capture has been working for Google for some time now.
Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service.
It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.
I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.
Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again.
There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through.
Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.