Sen. Elizabeth Warren published an extensive plan on Friday to break up big tech companies likes Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.
If elected president in 2020, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that she would pass legislation that would classify large tech platforms with annual global revenue of $25 billion or more as “platform utilities,” and break them apart via antitrust laws.
Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. 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’s proposal targets two practices she describes as anti-competitive.
- First, she would appoint regulators to reverse mergers that are anti-competitive, such as Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods.
- Second, she would prohibit tech platforms from participating in their own proprietary marketplace. She cites Amazon copying products from smaller companies on the Amazon Marketplace and then selling them at lower costs.
Warren’s team declined to provide further details on how this plan would be implemented.
SOURCE: Team Warren