his week the government filed a ground-breaking antitrust suit against Facebook, seeking to break up the corporation for monopolistic practices. The suit comes on the heels of a similar case against Google, as well as an aggressive Democrat-authored congressional report recommending taking apart not just Google and Facebook, but Apple and Amazon as well.

The evidence against Facebook seems overwhelming, with enforcers pointing to internal email conversations in which the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his colleagues allegedly conspired to monopolize the social media space by buying rivals and stifling competitors. Proof of intent to violate antitrust law appears to be ample. Yet news articles covering the case describe it as “far from a slam dunk”, and competition law experts predict that enforcers will “face an uphill battle” in proving their claims.

Embedded in these muted words about the legal viability of the case is a political battle about the nature of economic power. Both antitrust suits are the result of a new movement of anti-monopoly scholars and advocates pushing to reform a heavily concentrated and misshapen American economy. Yet within the cocooned world of orthodox antitrust experts, there’s a suspicious lack of enthusiasm for breaking up Facebook, or any of the tech goliaths. Fiona Scott Morton, for instance, a former Obama enforcer and opinion leader at Yale, wrote last year that “break-ups are not a good solution to the economic harms created by large firms in this sector.” And last year the leading antitrust scholar Herb Hovenkamp argued that “breakup remedies are radical and they frequently have unintended consequences,” and warned that “Judges aren’t good at breaking up companies.”