Elizabeth Warren: ‘It’s Time to Break Up’ Amazon, Facebook and Google
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) detailed her plan today to break up big tech companies — namely, Amazon, Facebook, and Google — as part of her 2020 platform.
The benefit of breaking up these massive, multibillion-dollar companies is to provide market space for smaller competitors and innovative start-ups, Warren argued.
“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” she wrote in a Medium post. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”
Warren continued:
“I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor.”
The big tech companies targeted by Warren make up roughly $2 trillion in market capitalization, which she believes allows them to “control over the way we use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation, and substitute their own financial interests for the broader interests of the American people.”
“To restore the balance of power in our democracy, to promote competition, and to ensure that the next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last, it’s time to break up our biggest tech companies,” she wrote.
As social media has exploded in the past decade, large players in the market — like Facebook — have bought out smaller competitors even when they aren’t directly fighting for the same audience.
“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,” Warren claimed.
