The prediction is a counterfactual conditional: Friedberg claims that if today’s large tech platforms were forcibly broken up into many smaller, less profitable firms, then those smaller firms would be unable to fund large-scale, capital‑intensive R&D (examples he gives: Amazon’s multibillion‑dollar satellite constellation; Alphabet’s self‑driving cars), so such projects would not proceed at the same scale or pace.

As of 29 November 2025, the key antecedent of this prediction has not occurred in the United States:

• No major U.S. tech platform (Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) has been forcibly broken up by antitrust authorities. There are ongoing lawsuits and regulatory actions (e.g., U.S. vs. Google search/ads, FTC vs. Meta, FTC/DOJ scrutiny of app stores and ad markets), but these have not resulted in structural breakups of the core firms.
• Because the structural breakup scenario hasn’t happened, we do not observe a world in which the big platforms have been split into dozens of much smaller, low‑profit firms that must self‑fund R&D. That means we cannot directly test the claim that, under that structure, large-scale projects like Kuiper or Waymo “would not get done” or would be much smaller/slower.

We can see that large, integrated platforms have continued to fund such projects since 2020 (e.g., Amazon continuing Project Kuiper; Alphabet continuing Waymo and other bets), which is consistent with Friedberg’s premise that high‑profit scale can support big R&D. But the core predictive content is about what would happen if those same firms were forcibly broken up, and that hypothetical has not been realized.

Because the necessary condition for evaluating the prediction (forcible breakup into many smaller firms) has not occurred, the prediction cannot be empirically verified or falsified at this time.

Therefore, the proper status is:

• Result: inconclusive – the world Friedberg is describing has not occurred, so the prediction cannot yet be tested in the real world.