A rare alignment of political forces in the US has cleared the way for a coordinated anti-trust investigation into the country’s four tech giants Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. It is a sign of the times that Microsoft has escaped attention this time despite its recent revival under Satya Nadella after years of stagnation when Steve Ballmer was at the helm. Microsoft after all was subject to one of the most famous anti-trust actions of all around 2001 when the US government accused it of illegally attempting to shore up its monopoly position in the PC market, chiefly by restricting rivals’ access to key software such as the Internet Explorer browser. Google itself has also been subject to US antitrust…