Elizabeth Warren calls to break up Facebook, Google and Amazon
Elizabeth Warren calls to break up Facebook, Google and
Amazon
Warren has been a part of a growing group of Democrats
calling for greater regulation and antitrust enforcement of major tech
companies.
By Jason Abbruzzese March 8, 2019, 6:35 AM PST
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Friday called
for the government to break up Facebook, Google and Amazon, offering a plan to
re-categorize the companies and reverse some major tech acquisitions.
Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 2020, has been a part of a growing faction within the party that
has called for greater regulation and antitrust enforcement of major tech
companies.
"Twenty-five years ago, Facebook, Google, and Amazon
didn’t exist. Now they are among the most valuable and well-known companies in
the world," Warren wrote in a post on the blogging platform Medium.
"It’s a great story — but also one that highlights why the government must
break up monopolies and promote competitive markets."
Warren's call also comes as Democrats have begun to plan
for increased oversight of tech companies after taking control of the House. On
Wednesday, House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to establish
strong net neutrality protections that would look to prevent major service
providers from using their power to manipulate how users experience the
internet.
Few Democrats, however, have actively called to break up
tech companies, as Warren did on Friday.
Warren said in her post that the consumer experience of
most internet users is dominated by Facebook, Google and Amazon, which can then
"use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation, and
substitute their own financial interests for the broader interests of the
American people."
Warren's plan calls for legislation that would feature a
new business category for companies with more than $25 billion of global
revenue that also "offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange,
or a platform for connecting third parties." These companies would be
called "platform utilities" and be prevented from owning the platform
and any of its participants, as well as be required to "meet a standard of
fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users." They would
also not be allowed to share data with other companies.
Warren pointed to Amazon's operation of its marketplace
and its sale of Amazon "Basics" as an example of a violation of the
proposed legislation. She also said that Google's various businesses would need
to be separated, including its ad exchange and its search engine.
Warren also said that she would be looking to federal
regulators to undo some recent mergers, including Amazon's ownership of the
grocer Whole Foods and e-commerce website Zappos, Facebook's ownership of
WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google's ownership of the navigation app Waze and
home device company Nest.
"Unwinding these mergers will promote healthy
competition in the market — which will put pressure on big tech companies to
be more responsive to user concerns, including about privacy," she wrote.
Facebook declined to comment on Warren's plan. Amazon and
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Luther Lowe, senior vice president of government
relations at Yelp, which has repeatedly claimed that Google uses its search
engine to scuttle competitors, said Warren's plan was "refreshing and
ambitious."
"I think Senator Warren really understands how these
markets work, and I think this type of proposal would inject some much needed
oxygen into the consumer internet markets, which today are calcifying as a
result of dominant firms like Google stifling innovation," Lowe said.
Warren is not entirely alone in proposing serious changes
to how tech companies are regulated. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., who heads
the House antitrust subcommittee, recently suggested in an interview with the
Financial Times a similar idea in which tech companies would be forced to split
up their platform from their customer data business.
Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at Harvard University's
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said that while
Warren's proposal is in the "right direction," Cicilline's plan
targets the heart of the power of big tech companies to use consumer data in
conjunction with their platforms to control their markets.
"The reason I like Cicilline's argument is that one
really does get to the meat of the way that these companies have been
constructed," he said.
Ghosh, who previously worked at Facebook as a privacy and
public policy adviser, said big tech companies have already been preparing for
regulation efforts. He pointed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement
on Wednesday that the company would be moving to make it so users can
communicate across its various apps.
Ghosh said these kinds of efforts will make it hard to
break up tech companies. He predicted that this is the start of a cat-and-mouse
game between tech companies and regulators that will go on for years.
"I think what these companies are trying to do.
especially Facebook, is figure out ways to really unsettle the competition
policy arguments that are taking shape by doing strategic things with their
companies," Ghosh said.
Comments
Post a Comment