Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

nytimes.com

733 pointschadmhorner711 comments

How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies? I already don’t use Facebook, I buy things online from places other than Amazon, and have email accounts that aren’t hosted by Google. However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service. Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for things that will make my use of the internet objectively worse (NN, SOPA, etc...).

But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google, because they’re better at playing that game.

>But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google...

Lobbying is tracked and google spent over 33% more than Comcast - in your own words - bribing members of Congress.

The bulk of Google’s lobbying expenditure was for immigration, tax reform and antitrust. I’d say Google’s far better “at playing the game” after all no one is randomly sticking up for Comcast.

You're right, I should have checked the facts before speculating on which company spent more on lobbying. However, the things they are lobbying for/against also matter. As a recent example, Net Neutrality involved massive amounts of lobbing and had very clear "pro-consumer" and "anti-consumer" sides.

From https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/net_neutrality/

> Not only was Google the pro-net neutrality organization that spent the most on lobbying in 2014 — $16.8 million in 2014 — it was the 10th biggest spender on federal lobbying that year. Impressive as that sounds, however, it still ranked behind both Comcast and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

And it seems like every dollar that Comcast spends lobbying is directed towards efforts that will have a negative impact on my life, and the lives of everyone not on Comcast's board of directors. At least with Google, sometimes our incentives align, so that's another point in favor of attempting to break up the Comcast monopoly before the Google one.

Google learned from Microsoft's mistake.

You pay your bribes or the justice department comes knocking. Google made antitrust investigations just vanish into thin air.

>>Lobbying is tracked and google spent over 33% more than Comcast - in your own words - bribing members of Congress.

That's just members of Congress. What about local governments? Keep in mind a lot of states don't have laws that require publicly disclosing lobbying efforts.

This "tracked" lobbying is drop in the dark matter of political money. There are huge numbers of "career" congressman with disproportionate amount of wealth even though their only supposedly legal income was less than $200K. Magic? You don't get private dinners with presidents with just legal lobbying money.

https://www.rollcall.com/news/hawkings/congress-richer-ever-...

curious: Do you think tech giants' lobbying is responsible for the recent shift in allowing more highly-skilled H1B visa holders to enter USA? it would, i imagine, lower the companies' cost of labor.

Yep, and given their data mining capabilities google is far more dangerous. Tbh they shouldn't own Android and YouTube, those companies should be spin off from alphabet.

Can you please provide source links to this 33%? I assume it is public info but where do I find that.

Lobbying is tracked and google spent over 33% more than Comcast - in your own words - bribing members of Congress.

Probably because they saw what happened when Microsoft tried to ignore Washington, DC. altogether. Can you blame Google for realizing that they couldn't just turn their backs on the game?

Also, does the public have the image of Comcast and Verizon CEOs as being specific people who are really rich and dislikable? So that taking them down a notch will make the public happy? And so taking them down a notch is a good political stance?

To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people already have choice.

Warren does herself no favors by using $25 billion as the threshold of a monopoly. What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level.

By not using consumer choice or harm as the standard (which is what the court uses), Warren comes across (and perhaps actually intends) to be against large companies, regardless of welfare.

In the past couple years, a new legal theory proposed that the definition of monopoloy needs to be updated for the 21st century.

Instead of focusing on consumer welfare, antitrust law should focus on 'anticompetitive behavior'. In this argument, amazon is the platform through which all other online sellers go to market, like railroads in the late 19th century. Behaving as both a platform and participant is anticompetitive, regardless of whether programs like 'amazon basics' make consumers happy.

NYT article about the author of the original law paper https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/monopoly-antit...

I don't have strong feelings on the issue, but this may help explain warren's stance, which isn't directly related to consumer choice.

> What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level.

Well, sure, 100% national market share is obviously a monopoly. But you're also a monopoly if you distort a market (generally markets with less than 3 major players) or have control or distortion over individual markets (you can have a monopoly in NYC but not the US, for example).

I think this obviously applies to telecoms, which often have monopolies over certain areas (and often granted by local government! thanks a lot Philly city council).

I think there's a whole host of bad behavior that's non-monopolistic. That's what I think needs to be cracked down on. Some of these do relate to market share, but I don't think it's as simple as a boolean monopoly / not-monopoly. It's a gradient, and much of the behavior in that gradient should be dealt with. There's often collusion between companies on pricing, or agreements not to compete, etc...

To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people already have choice.

It's only kinda choice. They have such a dominance over the social graph, most people who "leave" them don't actually completely leave. Most of them keep Facebook around as an address-book+messaging. People who "leave" by actually deleting their account then turn around and create obvious dummy accounts.

It's worth remembering that the career antitrust officials at the FTC felt that Google should face antitrust action back in 2012.

It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut the investigation down.

>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.

The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices…

In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...

Google's lobbying investment levels appear to have been quite adequate.

However, I would agree that the telecomm companies are also ripe for antitrust action.

Why not both? Dumping on someone’s policy because you don’t who they target first doesn’t really help.

God knows I’d trust her to break up ISPs before pretty much any other candidate.

That's a fair point, but I think that there is also a valid concern about distraction. Does focus on FAANG companies result in less attention given to the potentially more dangerous ISPs? Could the ISPs use concern about Amazon, etc as an argument that they are actually less dangerous and should be ignored?

I'm not "dumping" on her policy, I'm dumping on her choice of targets. I'm not happy about the App Store monopoly, but I'm actually upset at Comcast's behavior in every area they do business.

> Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for things that will make my use of the internet objectively worse (NN, SOPA, etc...).

Is this true? It depends on your use of the internet and definitions of “worse”, but I know that both Google and Facebook have been strong opponents of state-level Internet privacy legislation. They also spend huge amounts on lobbying, SV outspending Wall Street about 2:1 for the last few years. Do telcos spend more?

Alphabet spends about 50-75% more than Verizon or Comcast on lobbying. Which is amazing considering they’re not in a regulated industry. When you’re in a regulated industry, regulators micro-manage your business so there is a lot of lobbying involved dealing with relatively mundane and uncontroversial things. Not big picture stuff, but like cities vetoing fiber nodes because they’re ugly. Tech companies don’t deal with that, so it’s amazing they manage to spend more.

IMO, that is not the point. Lobby spending can be more indicative of a looming regulatory threat than to protect monopolies that harm consumers.

I also think that Warren is dead wrong. The internet/FB/GOOGL allow smaller businesses to flourish. 15 years ago, only major brands could afford to advertise or reach an audience, now niche companies can exist with a national or international presence.

If anything, these tech monopolies hurt the previously established, Coke/Kraft/Sears and they hurt VC's who can't find a way to scale a niche brand with smaller TAM's or compete directly with Amazon, etc.

> because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than google

Is that true? [1] indicates Google spent more than Comcast in lobbying in q1 2015. I have no idea how this varies quarter by quarter and since 2015, but Google spends a lot lobbying.

I would not be surprised if that extends to campaign contributions as well. Google donates a ton of money to a ton of politicians.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/21/google-co...

While I don’t know what Google spent their money lobbying for, so I’m not going to pick a side in my comment. I’d say the more important thing isn’t who spent the most money but what they spent it on. If for example Google spent some of that money fighting for Net Neutrality then that is better in my mind then Comcast spending most of their money fighting against it. I’m not saying this is the case or that Google has lobbied for good things. But knowing generally what they lobbied for would be a more useful piece of information.

She's called out Comcast before too — don't jump to the conclusion that someone can't chew gum and walk at the same time without at least a 10 second Google.

Forgive us for taking her campaign speeches at face value. She chose to make FAG the highlight of her campaign, not Comcast.

True. Another commenter linked to an article about Warren ragging on Comcast... back in 2016. What has she done about Comcast since then? Anything?

A counter-argument is that even someone like you who doesn't use facebook, amazon, and google is still irrevocably affected by their power and behaviors. You seem to think you've escaped them, but you surely have a Shadow Profile in facebook, you browse websites that show you AdSense ads (google), and oh yeah, your civic institutions are manipulable via popular opinion on facebook. Hmmm, you do have a strong point about Comcast and Verizon, but I think there's a false choice in there.

And how would breaking them up prevent any of that? Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on data collection, Google doesn't have a monopoly on display advertising, and Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on peer pressure.

agree, ISPs, cable-providers and wireless carriers should also be on the top of the list. Same here, there is no alternate to Comcast in where I live offering a similar service. They have been doing very slight improvements in service while almost doubling their prices.

Paying $110/month for a business line with 50 down / 10 up, while recently i was offered then refused a promotion upgrade to $140/month with 150 down / 25 up for 3 years. After three years, the pricing goes close $300. Unbelievable deceiving offerings for reduction in current pricing. Totally stuck... :(

On the other hand, the reasons that ISPs are territorial monopolies (local, state, and federal regulatory capture) are hard to address. Splitting territorial monopolies into smaller territorial monopolies is unlikely to help.

Comcast (et. al.) monopolies are largely due to local/municipal franchise agreements. Breaking up Comcast into a bunch of little baby Comcasts would not do any good if they are still granted local monopolies by little town boards and city councils.

Exactly. That's what happened to Ma Bell, and lo and behold! AT&T / Verizon still hold a large part of the country in a chokehold.

Because this is a political move and it is being done for political reasons.

There was a recent podcast by Chris Hayes on this topic with Kashmir Hill. It's not as easy to avoid FAANG as one would expect at first glance.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-block-big-tech-kas...

Also worth noticing that Comcast owns NBCUniversal/NBC/Chris Hayes. Not saying they instructed him specifically on how to opine on this one issue but there is a general conflict of interest.

In addition:

We had 27 large banks in the early 90's. These have merged into four enormous ones today [0].

We had 50 media corporations in the early 80's. They have merged into six today [1].

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-on...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

"How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies?"

Haha, the actual "but no, because" is that Comcast and Verizon said "why not the platforms first" in response to net neutrality.

Regulating one of these industries isn't at all in any way whatsoever in a first-second relationship with doing the same to the other industry.

Sorry if I'm asking something which is obvious to most people, but is it apparent that Comcast has out lobbied FAANG?

I recall Google having the highest expenditure on lobbying for one of the last few years.

The point about Comcast's anticompetitive practices still holds, but not as a "they do this worse than them" IMO.

Those are hard because the are natural monopolies. In the UK it was decided to privatise the national telecom provider and open the market up to to allow other suppliers. We got one other supplier who built all their infrastructure during a few years in the 90s and only in the choicest urban areas. The old monopolist is now solely responsible for supplying all the hard to reach rural areas.

The best solution is probably to accept the national monopoly and socialise the infrastructure, but like that will ever happen...

Comcast's monopoly is held in place by regulation that prevents competition, not market forces. It doesn't need to be broken up, just relax those regulations.

Also Comcast is more politically mature and dangerous, and more capable in manufacturing consent around issues of monopoly.

The average person will have an easier time understanding the concept that his favorite pundit is less discoverable on Google properties than his political opponent than the concept that Comcast owns Sky, MSNBC, Rotten Tomatoes, Universal Pictures, Telemundo, E!, Vox, The Verge and has all manners of pervasive influence in your thought.

Don't forget Spectrum (the result of the Charter and TWC merger) as well.

Saying Google == email is a bit naive. Google is search, and the internet starts with search. They definitely have a monopoly on search and it's what's essentially powering almost all of Google revenue right now.

Their revenue comes from ads, which happen to be on their search, which is used because it is the best, not because people are forced to use it.

That odd SV myopia. The trend in broadband has been more competition. Verizon competes with Comcast in almost its entire FiOS service area. These days it also competes with cellular—15% (and growing) of households have abandoned wired broadband in favor of cellular. There are four major cellular providers.

In tech, the trend has been in the other direction. If you don’t consider Sprint a viable competitor to AT&T, what does that say about Bing and the search market? If cellular isn’t competitive, what about mobile, where there is just Android and iOS?

Upvoted, seriously this, all the talk about Google, Amazon, Facebook hides many of the real problems and monopolies. These 3 don't even make it to a top 100 list of problematic companies.

You don't get it. She's aptly taking advantage of a liberal trend which is negative sentiment to companies causing income stratification in their respective and potential locations.

She doesn't really care about the underlying cause. If that was so then your points would be valid.

But look at how many news articles got published and how many people are getting excited about the thought. Being against successful technology companies is currently what liberals want and she's feeding her party.

because Google/Amazon/Facebook are more consequential to our life and society. But I agree cable companies should also be looked at. TBH there's no hope competition will ever be a thing where heavy infrastructure spending is at play, those companies should be made public and the infrastructure provided for businesses by the government through fees, just like roads and other basic infra.

What's an alternative model for telecommunications operation to what's in place today? We broke up Ma Bell, and now we're thinking about breaking up her descendants.

Even if Comcast et al. get broken up, we'll probably just end up with poor customer service from the resultant components until they merge.

Can you avoid using services that run on AWS, though? Or avoid sites that advertise and get analytics from Google? These companies are so dangerous not only because of their consumer-facing services, but the fact that they've made themselves an integral part of our online infrastructure.

How about going after all these companies...and to make it simple - start alphabetically.

Quite deceiving pushy sales people and their offerings with reduction in current pricing. I am considered a loyal grandfathered customer, yet i am totally stuck... :(

that doesn’t get the headline as much. don’t worry she won’t break anything up. she just wants to stand out in primary

> However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service.

An antitrust breakup of Comcast would be one or both of:

1. splitting off different lines of business, such as the content production parts from the physical cable service part, or

2. splitting them into different companies geographically.

Neither of these would do much to increase your ISP options.

"But we need to do X first!" is not a good reason to not do Y, a different-but-still-good thing. All of these companies need to be broken up, and the Department of Justice Anti-Trust division has enough employees to do it.

These monolithic companies are sucking up all of the power in our economy and have destroyed the competitive markets. As the Economist recently said "Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition." https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-...

Capitalism without competition isn't really capitalism, but feudalism.

Google is effectively has monopolies on search and online advertising.

They should be broken up.

actual how-about-ism detected in the wild. more of a debating trick than a comment.

That's a really good point. Let's nationalize the ISPs!

There's precedent to this in the USA. The US Government once passed regulations that caused one of the largest companies in America to break up into three smaller companies. Today those, three companies are entirely independent, employ over 400,000 people combined, and have a combined net work of over $400B.

Those companies are Boeing Aircraft (153k employees, $244B market value), United Technologies (202k employees, $148B market value), and United Airlines (88k employees, $33B market value).[0]

What most people perceive as a threat to the market is when one company takes over an entire single market. And that is a problem, no doubt. But in the case of Boeing, the problem was that one company had such an advantage vertically- lose money on planes in order to make money on shipping, or vice versa, as needed. It meant it could win in whichever market it wanted to and slowly come to dominate all of those markets. The synergies of doing it all internally meant it could win at everything.

If one uses that situation as a precedent, one can start to see the parallels in many of the FAANG companies today.

[0] "The Air Mail Act of 1934 prohibited airlines and manufacturers from being under the same corporate umbrella, so the company split into three smaller companies – Boeing Airplane Company, United Airlines, and United Aircraft Corporation, the precursor to United Technologies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing

The problem is this type of vertical splitting doesn't solve the problem of large tech companies. It's like treating a burst appendix with a kidney transplant.

The problem of Amazon is that it is effectively the only online shopping place, and thus can act as a Monopsony in hiring it's workers for warehouses, splitting AWS out of that doesn't fix that problem. Maybe you could require that distribution centers be owned by separate companies. This might work but locally each Center would still be a Monopsony and thus cause the same problem. Maybe if you capped the size of distribution center you could force lots of smaller ones to be built, but at this point I worry that you are going to end up making shipping slower and more expensive.

The problem of Google is they are very dominate in the Ads space splitting out the Ads portion into another company would not solve that. Facebook's problems is everyone has put their data in Facebook has friends in Facebook and feel compelled to keep using it. I don't see how splitting up the company into, Instagram, What's App, and Facebook solves the network effects of those apps.

Splitting up tech companies is not a punishment to make the CEO feel bad or change their ways. It is a technique to change how we need the market works to benefit the large population. As such we need to think about how to split them, the effects, and most importantly if the effect achieves the intended result.

If we had a progressive corporate tax, I think all the problems would sort themselves out.

You want to build a trillion dollar company? Fine. Corporate tax rate of 50%. You're a small business with less than $1M in revenue. Cool. Corporate tax rate of 0%.

Big companies will break up to take advantage of the tax code. Problem solved.

Instead, the bigger you are, the harder you can lobby for tax breaks. Currently, if you're a $1M company, that sucks. You pay 20%+. If you're Amazon, you pay $0.

Splitting AWS out of Amazon isn't the thing that really matters though so much as preventing Amazon from operating a store AND a marketplace on the same site, not to mention having its own product lines. If you want to sell something online and you're not already a household name then you're at a big disadvantage if you're not on Amazon, but if you do sell there then the price is giving Amazon insight into your business. And if Amazon chooses it can basically bury you by promoting your competitors or worse, selling its own copy of your product.

> Splitting up tech companies is not a punishment to make the CEO feel bad or change their ways. It is a technique to change how we need the market works to benefit the large population. As such we need to think about how to split them, the effects, and most importantly if the effect achieves the intended result.

What exactly is that intended result?

In my opinion, Amazon as a platform has leveraged network effects to be both a monopsony and a monopoly: in essence by aggregating both consumers and suppliers, both sides of the transaction feel compelled to use Amazon as a middle man.

This is very insightful. When one considers how a monolith application could be split into a collection of microservices but STILL serve the same user experience, it becomes evident how trust-busting won't affect meaningful change.

We also broke up Ma Bell back in 84 and it looks like they are on their way to fully reuniting as an even larger monopoly.

https://i.imgur.com/rMFqmbt.jpg

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/att-time-warner...

Ma Bell wasn't created naturally at all. It's monopoly status was granted by the federal government. This is fundamentally different from Facebook, Amazon, etc. If anything, the large ISPs like ATT, Verizon, and Spectrum should be looked at, but solving the problems of ISP monopolization will take a lot more than just breaking up territorial monopolies into smaller territorial monopolies.

That's a different failure. The government should have never allowed for the subsequent mergers.

The US also broke up Ma Bell in 1956, forcing the spinoff of Bell Canada and Caribbean operations, and before that in 1925, breaking off other international operations into ITT.

Imagine how much of a larger monopoly they would be now if they were never broken up in the first place.

How would this work in practice though? Eg Amazon. Bezos is a major shareholder. Imagine splitting AWS from the retail arm, which I guess would be a sensible split point. If Bezos controls both, then what would really change?

I'm not critical to the idea nor supportive - I'm just curious to learn more.

That was the case when Standard Oil was broken up and it's not a problem. The retail arm becomes free to get their cloud computing needs from others -- say Azure or Google. Bezos can't force them to get a worse deal at AWS simply because he owns the AWS. A lot of the arguments for breaking up companies come from this. It can make the components more efficient once they're freed from the shackles of being locked in. Likewise, the crappy parts of the big conglomerate can't coast on having a guaranteed customer. This is the whole point of capitalism. Monopolies are the anti-thesis of capitalism.

Did you read her proposal? There would be a structural separation from distribution and first party goods. Just like railroads couldn't own interests in the commodities they were transporting, Amazon couldn't operate a market place and also own private label brands.

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

One of the perceived risks of breaking up the tech giants is that they will be at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign peers. The degree of competitive risk at the time of Boeing's split was perceived as lower. As long as Americans are ok with losing some areas of advantages, they should move forward.

There are other regulatory tools to level the playing field with foreign companies.

Anti-competition law and it's interpretation has changed drastically in the US after Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978). Reagan administration used it as their bible.

Yes. Broadly speaking, the law went from looking at concentration as a bad thing on its own to only looking at whether consumer prices would be impacted. The prevalent idea now is that mega-mergers will reduce prices because of economies of scale.

It also doesn't help that there seems to be academic corruption or at least conflicts of interest driving the new interpretation. https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-mor...

Laws are fluid and can change back to respond to new situations.

I think it was Stigler, the nobel laureate, that had done quite a bit or research on monopolys and the effect of mergers and acquisitions on jobs.

https://promarket.org/stigler-monopolies-competition-tough-w...

It was back in 2001 that I remember reading a newspaper article on this

But the companies will all still have the same owners. So one wonders if splitting them actually helps with anything?

It's a legitimate concern. After Standard Oil was split up, Rockefeller still arranged meetings of the heads of the now-separated companies.

However as long as the companies are well regulated and publicly traded, I think the concern diminishes over time. Each manager has an incentive to look out for their own shareholders, their own bonuses. And if activist shareholders suspect one company is subsidizing another, they can happily buy the undervalued company, raise a ruckus (and maybe some lawsuits), and profit when the subsidies end.

I don’t know about “help”, but it will still change something - over time the different management teams will diverge (in some sense), even if the shareholders stay mostly the same.

Per Das Wiki [1]: "The government had little choice but to return service to the commercial airlines, but did so with several new conditions. The Air Mail Act of June 12, 1934, drafted at the height of the crisis by Black (and known as the "Black-McKellar bill"), restored competitive bidding, closely regulated airmail labor operations,[n 28] dissolved the holding companies that brought together airlines and aircraft manufacturers, and prevented companies that held the old contracts from obtaining new ones."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Mail_scandal#Effects_on_th...

What about Ma Bell?

Comparisons will be made to Microsoft and Internet Explorer but to me the really crucial part of this isn't market dominance in the "what app are you using" sense, it's data.

Facebook, Google and Amazon really do have an unprecedented amount of data on us. And keep vacuuming up more and more of it. Facebook should never have been allowed to buy WhatsApp (and maybe not Instagram though I'm less concerned about that one). Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick.

Question is how you'd effectively roll that back now. I'm concerned that the government doesn't have enough people with the technical knowledge to really tackle the data question, but I'm still glad Warren is starting the conversation. And she's got some interesting ideas:

> Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.”

> These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

This is also the first idea I've seen that tries to deal with the free speech problem on the internet. A lot of platforms today apply varying amounts of censorship (like youtube's copyright takedown mess), but there isn't really anything we can do because it's a privately owned platform and they can do whatever they want. But when they control such a large amount of mindshare, we end up putting the idea of free speech at risk.

Perhaps the platform utility designation will let us enforce a kind of "content neutrality" instead.

Is this a good idea? Giving "fair time" to not only YouTube malcontents, but also actively bad actors i.e. state funded shills?

I don't see how this could be implemented to the best interest of the USA without "censorship" being involved at some point.

Just because something has a lot of mindshare doesn't mean you have any business silencing their choices. People who don't agree with the policies of private companies like Facebook can simply not use it. Try Gab if you want a private company that is anti-censorship.

> Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more ...

Hiding revenue is something multi-national corporations do really well.

If I ran a company that had a platform as described, and we were approaching the 25bn mark, I'd find ways to make sure we never crossed that line.

Losing IP to what would become a 'public utility' would discourage me from ever trying to develop beyond the 24.9bn mark.

That works to some degree, but there's some point at where it is more beneficial to just spin the platform into its own company and let it be regulated while all your other services can operate freely without having to hide most of their revenue.

Sure, some of your IP moves to a new company that is more restricted in how it can operate. But at least your marketplace doesn't hold back everything else your company is doing.

PG&E is fine with this model and they don't have to give up their IP or profits. Essentially it would turn Google and the other tech platforms into legal monopolies. That being said, I think this is probably the best way we can keep getting awesome technology from Google while at least having some government oversight. I kinda feel like were getting to the point in human evolution where we need giant giant groups of people to work together to solve really big technical problems. While problematic on many levels, a government sanctioned and regulated monopoly around google could potentially accomplish those things.

>If I ran a company that had a platform as described, and we were approaching the 25bn mark, I'd find ways to make sure we never crossed that line.

I feel like shareholders wouldn't be very happy with this

>Hiding revenue is something multi-national corporations do really well.

I thought it was profits that were easily hidden. Hiding revenue seems like it would be very difficult.

> Losing IP to what would become a 'public utility' would discourage me from ever trying to develop beyond the 24.9bn mark.

(it wouldn't be a public utility but) I feel like that's kind of the point? Encourage dozens of smaller (if multi-billion counts as "small") businesses to thrive rather than one 25bn+ business. And if you do want to go big, you have to do it in a way that lifts up significantly smaller businesses.

Ok, works as intended.

Separating Google Search and Google's ad business would kill both. Advertising subsidizes search, search supports advertising.

Google isn’t only search and ads. Their adverse is worse in smaller markets like Maps and Cloud, where they use revenue from another market to commoditize and build a moat in another — thereby unfairly competing.

Gut reaction: I feel like Android would not survive Google being forced to remove all their apps from the Google play store.

Android is perhaps the closest in comparison to Microsoft/Internet Explorer. Spin off Android into its own company, including the Play Store. There would be nothing stopping Google from keeping their apps in the Play Store, but they would sit on the same level as competing mapping and search apps, and users would choose which one to use instead of have it preinstalled.

That would be great. Android has a competition-destroying business model: giving away the OS for free, while subsidizing OS development with ad revenue from unrelated services. It killed companies like Symbian who just sold you an OS in exchange for a license fee, without trying to marry that to services you can't easily switch away from because they have all your data.

Defining by dollar amount is never a good idea due to inflation/market appreciation. There are so many laws and regulations that are pinned to a dollar amount that get more and more out of date each year.

It should always be something that's a better true absolute measure, for example market penetration.

Isn't data collection by the ISPs/phone companies a bigger issue? Consumers truly have no choice there. Whereas you could get by without FAANG, though it'd be inconvenient.

To what end? "illegally undermine competition?"

She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have?

>Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties.

That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing.

There are other things that can be done. You could require freedom of speech apply to industry leaders for example. However I suspect the democrats would never propose that because it would be bad for them.

>I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing.

I think amazon : amazon basics is a great example of antitrust/unfair monopoly the same as google search : almost all consumer facing google products.

Both amazon and google search are the dominate online market leaders in their respective categories. In amazons case they unfairly use their market position to begin offering amazon private label products on their platform. They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI. In the case of google they too unfairly use their position as a market leader against their own customers (advertisers), so say you are a hotel booking platform and spend $x with google, google knows the market (searches, clicks, etc...) so google launches their own hotel booking, gives their in-house service priority in search results over existing market incumbents and self bids on google search advertising for key industry terms to drive up costs of advertisers to keep in business.

It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved. It’s unfairly using your market position, not to compete, but to be anti competitive to the detriment of consumers.

I’d like to see the tech giants prevented from unfairly using their market dominance to stifle competition. As we saw with the break up of standard oil...competition is good for consumers.

She has no proof, she does not need any. this is typical politician using FUD to scare the populace into letting them take actions which in the end only go to bolster their own campaign coffers and personal riches. With the upcoming Presidential campaign you can expect politicians tripping over each other using jealously and fear to get people to plea for action.

Amazon is not a Standard Oil by any measure as they have ample competition when it comes to online sales. Facebook is still an opt in environment. If you don't want to join facebook you don't have to and no retailer is dumb enough (well that might not be true but I haven't found one) to require you to be a facebook member to purchase products or services. Google is, well google. I don't have to use their search engine if I don't want to.

There is a case for splitting Amazon and AWS.

The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentration of market and political power in the hands of the few. You don't need evidence of any specific crime to do it.

You can say you'd prefer it not be that way. But it's a provision of existing law, with precedents. To really argue for your preference you'd need to show how those applications didn't turn out well.

> You could require freedom of speech apply to industry leaders for example.

What does this mean? Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, et al already have their constitutionally protected speech, except for where their roles as executives at public companies restrict them. If they find those restrictions onerous they can leave their roles.

> To what end? "illegally undermine competition?"

It doesn't have to be illegal to undermine competition. Luxottica owns a vertical of 80% of the brands, the factories, the retail stores, AND the largest insurance company concerning eyeglasses in America. It isn't illegal, but the rents they are extracting from our society by keeping prices artificially high sure as hell SHOULD be.

They've admitted that they work together on censorship issues. They're colluding together to harm potential competitors: Gab is banned from the Google app store, and Google was running a competing social media network Google+. This is exactly what ATT was doing that got them broken up.

> The key components of the Warren plan include passing legislation that would designate companies with annual global revenue above $25 billion that provide marketplace, exchange, or third-party connectivity as “platform utilities” and prohibit those companies from owning participants on their platforms.

As a Googler, speaking for myself, this seems like an interesting idea that could positively impact the tech scene.

I wonder how people’s perspectives might change if the largest and most influential companies of the next century aren’t American.

Why the $25 billion restriction, I wonder? Is it just to make this more of a "bill of attainder" aimed at the specific companies in question, or there some principled reasoning behind it?

I could get behind something like this if it also presented these platforms with a consistent framework for moderating content. They reach levels where they are more akin to public spaces than digital communities, and should have moderation strategies which mirror this.

I also see Elizabeth Warren has created a set of powerful enemies way too early that will do much to stop her from becoming America's first woman president. If you wanna do something like this wait until you are in office. These are not issues that your average American cares about.

Does anyone actually believe that the US government's interventions against Microsoft made the slightest bit of difference, as opposed to huge shifts in the internet and mobile landscape?

You could argue that the emergence of Firefox and Chrome was only made possible by the ability to assign a "default" non-IE browser in Windows, but that ability pre-dated any of the anti-trust stuff anyway; all you got out of that was a mandatory pop-up when you installed Windows asking you if you wanted to use a different browser.

The emergence of Firefox was by itself a huge shift, and Chrome another one, against Microsoft's browser monopoly. Its OS monopoly got broken (insofar as it is broken) by a combination of the rise of mobile and Apples re-emergence as a viable platform. Its office application monopoly got broken (insofar as it is broken) by a combination of online email systems (especially gmail) and the increased availability of online alternatives.

All the justice department did was waste their time; they could have just sat by the river and waited for the body of their enemy to float by instead.

I apolgoize that I don't have any references available at the moment, but I've read in several books that Microsoft insiders said it made an enormous difference.

Having the government essentially watching their every move caused them to moderate their actions, and make sure they were on the right side of the law.

They were much more conservative than they otherwise would have been. It was described as a large cultural shift in the company and their way of thinking.

In the middle of the process there was an election and the new executive didn't want to actually go after Microsoft. They then got off much easier than their misdeeds required. At one point an OS/Office breakup was in the cards and that would actually have been a major shift in the industry. It's not surprising that what was actually done didn't have that much impact.

I was but a lowly intern when the verdict came down, but I can tell you I heard the term "consent decree" more times than I could count.

Microsoft's behavior changed and they stopped trying to own every single niche market within the software field by any means necessary. I think that allowed for an opening by other players in addition to the tech trends you mentioned.

What is the alleged anti-competitive behavior? The article doesn't mention it. It sounds like she is calling for their breakup merely for being big and powerful, and if that were cause enough to break up an entity we would logically start with the government.

For starters, Amazon provided a marketplace platform for third parties to sell goods. They then gathered data on which items sold the best, created their own line of products based off this data, and crushed their customers-turned-competitors using their massive advantage in economies of scale.

The Medium article[1] mentions a couple - Google prioritizing their reviews above Yelp in search results, Amazon copying third party products that were successful on its marketplace.

[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

She's a politician. She doesn't need logic behind her statements. Rather, she's tapping into progressive sentiments and trying to ignite her base during primary season.

well, the element that corrupts government should be removed and a govt for the people restored. Just breaking it up is as anti productive as just breaking up a company, if the company isnt breaking any laws. Govt is a different type of entity than a corporation and as enlightening as the comparison might be, a thought exercise is all that comparison should really be.

Perhaps not the government itself which exists within strict constitutional boundaries, but the same logic should apply to the major political parties with hard caps on the amount of incoming donations over which they have to "structurally separate" from the electoral process.

Whatever that means.

The government is already being dis-intermediated. You could look at this as the government eliminating their competition.

These companies have more revenue and cash on hand than many countries. Looking at the Bay Area, Google and Facebook are taking the lead on repairing and improving infrastructure because the government can't do it alone anymore.

There's a difference, at least on paper, between the government and corporations: the government is big and powerful, but (in a republican society) is accountable in some way to the people and society as a whole. Corporations are also big and powerful, and (in a capitalist society) accountable only to a majority of their shareholders.

So there's a reason to believe that you cannot have corporations serve the public interest without either breaking them up to limit their power or fundamentally redefining what it means to be a corporation, but you can have government serve the public interest while remaining big and powerful. If the federal government followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career politicians, we'd say, "Great, you're actually doing your job." If Amazon followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career managers, we'd be very confused.

(That said, breaking up the government sounds like a fine plan too, I just don't think it needs to be first)

Google/Facebook/Amazon have the power to push any startup competition out of the market in ways that are hard to even enumerate. Think about all of the services, devices, and standards that they control.

Watching the fanboys defend their favorite tech giant is incredible. These companies are not behaving in the markets or people's best interest and they are way too big, at a scale that dwarfs most of the worlds organizations.

> Watching the fanboys defend their favorite tech giant is incredible. These companies are not behaving in the markets or people's best interest and they are way too big, at a scale that dwarfs most of the worlds organizations.

It's not illegal to be big, it's illegal to use your influence to prevent competition in a way that's illegal. There's zero evidence of that, which is why she's talking about a new law.

And please refrain from calling those that disagree with you "fanboys". It diminishes every single point you're attempting to make, because you sound like a jaded teenager rather than an adult that wants to have a conversation.

As long as those services are profitable and they can outcompete startups then there’s nothing illegal or wrong about that. There’s no right that startups need to survive or have bias to succeed.

I ran across two quotes by Warren that caught my attention:

> "unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition"

> "I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules"

The word "illegally" in the first quote really set off my alarm bells. What have large companies like Amazon, Google, FB, etc. done that is considered illegal in this regard?

The "by the rules" in the second quote is confusing too. What does that mean? Which rules are being broken?

The way I see it: Isn't it the goal of entrepreneurs to be as successful as possible? Let's say I found a way to grow a business to that of the size of some of the bigger ones (which would be awesome). To grow a business that big, consumers obviously like what I'm selling/producing. I get the impression that Warren is saying she doesn't like big businesses because they snuff out the little ones. And maybe that's true, but why is that a concern of the government? There's nothing stopping a smaller company (or even an individual) from coming up with a really good idea and trying that idea out in something like his garage, and then reshaping the next generation... kinda like Amazon did in comparison to Sears. Or Microsoft did with IBM.

I'm sure there's going to be plenty of disagreements on my stance, but I guess I'm just not seeing this problem in the same light as Warren.

It's a little hard to tell if you're asking "are there laws against monopolies?" or "should there be laws against monopolies?".

The answer to the first is a certain yes. There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States. You can read up on the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts from the 1890s and 1910s to start with. There is also considerable case law stemming from this legislation.

The answer to "should there be laws against monopolies" is a little more open. One theoretical justification for breaking up monopolies, is that in some cases monopolies cause economic inefficiencies. Look up "deadweight loss from monopoly pricing".

It's very complicated to measure any efficiencies or inefficiencies from tech monopolies, so I don't think there's a clear answer.

It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government, so there is a lot of room for debate on that question.

You're high if you think someone can compete with Amazon out of their garage now.

Hell, you can't even sell a product on Amazon without a good chance that Amazon will just slap their Amazon Basics logo on it and undercut you to death.

Similar to Wal-Mart many of their competitors are dead because they optimized their supply chain. No one gets that kind of access out of their garage.

> "illegal"

because Amazon uses their non-retail business profits to identify high selling items, produce them themselves, sell them at a lower price (because they have all the data also), and finally steer customers to those products. They're the market place and a player. This new idea isn't well defined in law, but using your profits from one company to undercut another area is illegal.

> "by the rules"

is the same idea as "illegal", and even if they're not, the point she's trying to make is the fact they are not breaking rules should be setting off alarm bells because...

> "but why is that a concern of the government?"

because America loves the free market, and big business is the enemy of it.

I think breaking up the ISPs and media conglomerates would be much more impactful.

I can't think of a single market segment where Google and Amazon lack effective competition. Facebook is already bleeding users, and how would you break up a social media company in an impactful way anyhow? Facebook's ventures outside of social media aren't even close to being monopolies.

Facebook owns Instagram, Whatsapp, and dozens other platforms. Sure, Facebook proper is bleeding users, but the platform gaining the most users right now is Instagram, which is still Facebook.

Google would be fairly easy to break up among Alphabet subsidiaries, and Amazon could be split among Amazon.com, AWS, and Whole Foods.

She actually gets fairly specific about what she her plan is if you actually read the medium article linked in the first paragraph of the OP.

> I think breaking up the ISPs and media conglomerates would be much more impactful.

While i agree with you wholeheartedly i don't know anyone who has ever got elected by attacking the media and big business.

Yeah, they are not monopolies in the classical sense, so the regulatory position has to be much more nuanced.

But there are issues:

+ Amazon uses profits from AWS to dump in other sectors, selling goods and services below market value. The weird situation could mean Amazon pumps many billion dollars a year into pushing major grocers (who operate on thin margins) out of business. This is not good for anyone - but it's not a case of 'monopoly' so much.

+ Google is dumping in adjacent areas of tech - giving away Android for free, for example.

There should be some regulatory tweaks here, but it's going to be tricky.

As you point out - a much easier win would be to break up value chain consolidation over all.

Carriers, tech providers, content creators, content distributors - might benefit from being separate entities.

I don't think there are any net benefits to society from these entities being consolidated. There are no economies of scale, no proper synergies. There are however, huge incentives for investors to have AT&T own content creation and distribution obviously, so they can subsidize their own assets and not others. There's no long win for consumers so it makes sense to keep them separate.

Finally - there might be an opportunity on platforms. I think that the Apple store may be an anti-competitive issue - the notion that you don't control/own the $1K device you just bought is getting ridiculous. I would require platform makers to at allow open access to the platform. Same would apply to mobile phones being 'locked' onto a network - that should just not happen.

I think we should also consider that even if you do break up a large company like that, you'd need to make sure they don't pull an AT&T and start merging with each other to basically re-create their previous structure.

Yeah, I'm still amazed that when AT&T was split up, there wasn't anything in the ruling preventing them from just joining the parts back together again.

From Warren's blog post:

> ... Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.

I think maybe her team needs to do a little more research on what Google's business is. Splitting off Android/Play or GCP at least creates potentially viable businesses. Splitting up search and ads creates two non-viable businesses.

> two non-viable businesses

1. Search company earns money by selling ad spots to ads company.

2. Ads company earns money by selling ads to merchants.

> The parallel she uses to make her case is the breakup of Microsoft, which she weirdly calls “the tech giant of its time” (Microsoft is still a tech giant), and holds as perhaps the last example when government went toe to toe with the technology industry.

> “The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge,” Warren writes.

In what way was Microsoft 'broken up'? The outcome[1] from that antitrust case seems to be that Microsoft had to publicly expose all of Windows' APIs to developers (no secret APIs).

If anything, the outcome of the Microsoft case seems to support non-intervention as AppGoogBook all flourished despite no serious breakup of Microsoft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

Sure, but Microsoft after the lawsuit was not the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" powerhouse from the 90s it used to be. They couldn't be, they couldn't risk another antitrust suit that might have real consequences. I think one could argue that Microsoft not being in full on domination mode created the opening that enabled all these other companies to thrive since they no longer had to deal with the extended existential threat of Microsoft.

Microsoft was going to be broken up, until the political landscape changed.

Even without the breakup, Microsoft was under heavy scrutiny and regulation as a result of the court case, which insiders say dramatically changed the company culture (for good or ill.)

It's funny how Microsoft isn't mentioned in the same breath as FAANG companies. It's in the top 3 companies by market cap, has a dozen billion-dollar businesses, does really well in enterprise, is aggressive in the cloud and hardware, has a large seat at the open-source table these days, and has a large set of older products that keep generating billions. If Apple is in there, why not Microsoft? Both are heavily concentrated in one area, pay similarly, have similar prestige. Is it simply because we don't know where to put the M in FAANG? Or is it because they aren't as big in the consumer space?

Planet Money looks prescient again, with a three-part series on how antitrust rules evolved in the US, and how they are changing in response to Big Tech:

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696342011/anti...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

Even if it were beneficial (argument in itself), Big Government is unequipped to handle the break-up of these companies in way that protects their value to consumers.

Nitpicking here, but in Warren’s post she writes:

> Google couldn’t smother competitors by demoting their products on Google Search.

Isn’t this already illegal?

What about AMP, where failure to publish your content using their proprietary toolkit meant that you wouldn’t be featured at the top of the search results?

What US law would dictate that? Google isn't a common carrier, and there are no laws dictating that a privately created platform must give equal weight and promotion to everyone...

it might be in different countries, I don't know.

From my experience, the engineers in search are very aware they could do monopolistic things, and really try their hardest not to.

Yes, yes it is.

Preventing those companies from buying out others and using their incredible size and resources to quashing competition I can support. Splitting into pieces can make sense as well. It looks like Warren's definition of "Fair Use" is more in the context of selling widgets and does not appear to be tied to free speech issues. I guess that Elizabeth Warren isn't supporting a definition of "fair use" of these platforms that matches the United States Supreme court definition of free speech.

There's zero net benefit in breaking up large companies that are driving innovation and improving consumer experiences.

If you don't like the economic result, redistribute some of the growth. Walmart doesn't deserve to be saved by splitting up Amazon if they can't compete.

I was gonna say, selling your winners and keeping your losers is exactly what you're _not_ supposed to do when investing.

The thought, clearly expressed in Elizabeth Warren's post, is that Amazon et al are stifling innovation by discouraging entrants and using dominant positions in adjacent industries to crowd out competitors. This isn't a new idea—it's one of the pillars of antitrust.

> The story demonstrates why promoting competition is so important: it allows new, groundbreaking companies to grow and thrive — which pushes everyone in the marketplace to offer better products and services. Aren’t we all glad that now we have the option of using Google instead of being stuck with Bing?

It's dishonest to suggest that the outcome of the US vs Microsoft somehow paved the way for Google. I would argue it was pretty non-consequential but looms in the public conscious.

From wikipedia:

> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future ... > Law professor Eben Moglen noted that the way Microsoft was required to disclose its APIs and protocols was useful only for “interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product”, not for implementing support of those APIs and protocols in any competing operating system.

It's been discussed in multiple articles that Microsoft had considered moves it could make to kill Google, but didn't because of it's recent antitrust settlement.

> As the government sued, Microsoft executives became so anxious and gun-shy that they essentially undermined their own monopoly out of terror they might be pilloried again. It wasn’t the consent decrees or court decisions that made the difference, according to multiple current and former Microsoft employees. It was “the constant scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time,” said Gene Burrus, a former Microsoft lawyer. “People started second-guessing themselves. No one wanted to test the regulators anymore.”

> There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders.

> Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft’s monopoly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...

http://archive.is/abGMG

I think the most obvious candidate is to split Google and Youtube.

Not at all. It's to split Amazon retail and AWS. Not that I'm opposed to that or not, but it is the most obvious. If you look at templates of prior antitrust action, you'd probably see roadmaps of splitting ad presentation/platform from ad brokering/targeting in all of the companies mentioning.

which would be very interesting, as youtube is 100% dependent on Google infrastructure to work (everything from machine learning to data delivery).

To my knowledge, American monopoly laws focus more on the welfare of the consumer and whether customers are being negatively affected rather than the companies themselves. There’s nothing wrong with having a monopoly, but where issues arise is when consumers start to be hurt.

In this context, how do Elizabeth Warren’s comments mesh out?

Monopolies are inherently harmful to consumers, as reduced competition means less parties can compete for the best offering, or push to create a better product. The myth that a monopoly "isn't hurting anyone" is nonsense. It's existence is enough, and yes, impacting other competitors negatively directly harms consumers. There has been an outdated focus on price specifically, which is why many free services have evaded the law for so long.

That being said, Warren directly states something tech companies should be competing on: Privacy. An issue with direct consumer impact, that due to monopoly status, these companies have largely not set as a priority.

I recommend listening to Planet money's series on antitrust. You'll see why your statement was indeed the rationale behind not enforcing the monopoly regulations. Spoiler: it wasn't the care for the welfare of the consumer.

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

This gets me very excited. As a bay area resident, we've seen the income stratification from these companies ruin our way of life. It's just untenable.

Warren has my vote.

I'd like to say this is just politics but I'm not even sure it's good politics. How many people are really concerned about the size of Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. If people are that concerned, why do so many people I know have Prime?

The fossil fuel industry continues to run rampant. As does the Military Industrial Complex. The former is a key player in the degradation of the planet; the latter is a money sucking Hover that is sucking the life out of infrastructure, education, etc.

The environment and peace are much bigger issues than taking down and busting up the tech giants.

Editorial: I want to like Liz Warren. I can related to some of her ideals. Unfortunately, as a politician she too often comes off as inexperienced, out of touch and/or naive. This is another one of those times.

> I'd like to say this is just politics but I'm not even sure it's good politics. How many people are really concerned about the size of Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc

Oh, lots and lots.

> If people are that concerned, why do so many people I know have Prime?

The reason so many of the people you know have Prime is because of Amazon's dominant market position.

> The fossil fuel industry continues to run rampant. As does the Military Industrial Complex. The former is a key player in the degradation of the planet; the latter is a money sucking Hover that is sucking the life out of infrastructure, education, etc.

> The environment and peace are much bigger issues than taking down and busting up the tech giants.

Good points, but can we not do all three of these things? (1) Shrink the Defense budget and (2) Invest in renewables including nuclear tech, (3) Tackle Facebook and Google's dominance of net advertising and search and social media and Amazon's of e-commerce and so on …

> Editorial: I want to like Liz Warren. I can related to some of her ideals. Unfortunately, as a politician she too often comes off as inexperienced, out of touch and/or naive. This is another one of those times.

“Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and academic serving as the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts since 2013. Warren was formerly a prominent scholar specializing in bankruptcy law. A noted progressive leader, Warren has focused on consumer protection, economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Some commentators describe her position as left-wing populism.[2][3][4]

Warren is a graduate of the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School. She taught law at several universities, including the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University.

Warren's initial foray into public policy began in 1995 when she worked to oppose what eventually became a 2005 act restricting bankruptcy access for individuals. Her profile rose due to her forceful stances in favor of more stringent banking regulations following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. She served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for which she served as the first Special Advisor.”

Is breaking them up really a priority? What benefit would that have that we couldn't achieve via properly taxing and regulating them in the first place?

It would help give China a fairer chance in the AI race. Due to economies of scale and the sheer amount of resources they command, Facebook and Google are able to conduct research that would otherwise be incredibly expensive (e.g. training AlphaZero), and offer incredibly high salaries to lure in researchers. Apparently 80% of all machine learning engineers work at Google or Facebook! Breaking this concentration of machine learning research power would give companies like Baidu, Bytedance and Tencent, which were not broken up and which enjoy strong government support, the chance to catch up and maybe even overtake the remnants of Google/Facebook.

I think the general theory is that if we allow them to continue getting bigger and swallowing up all potential competitors, we’re basically saying these four or five companies will run everything, forever.

Taxing and regulation stifles innovation, risk taking and productivity. It also encourages cronyism.

I prefer breaking up monopolies if the end result will be a healthier, consumer-focused and competition driven market.

Given that this is an Elizabeth Warren idea, I'm suspicious that the motives are anything having to do with creating a vibrant market... :)

I guess by breaking them up, regulating and taxing them becomes easier, because the parts don't have the same power?

I don’t see how Amazon is such an threat to consumers?

Genuine question, can someone explain how they are bad? I might give pushback to help get to understanding other people, but I’m not trying to start a war on here:)

The tech giants are too big, but there are geopolitical consequences for breaking them up. Countries like Russia and China can target smaller companies much easier than the Goliaths.

Reminds me of this post by Richard Stallman, [1].

> Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.

> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

[1] https://stallman.org/amazon.html

Amazon is eroding brick and mortar mom and pop stores, but it isn't doing that because it's a monopoly (it has 5% of retail sales), it's doing it because people prefer shopping online compared with physical stores. If you broke up Amazon into 5 competing e-commerce sites, strip malls across America would still be closing, and you'd just have 5 Bezos billionaires instead of 1.

And it will do nothing to help the millions of American retail workers who are going to be out of a job, nor the logistics workers who are going to be automated out of jobs.

This is populist demagoguery and scapegoating and not looking at real solutions, like strengthening the social safety net by increasing taxes on these businesses. At least Medical for All, Free College, or UBI have tangible, immediate benefits to people suffering.

Or writing laws on Data Privacy can directly address that issue.

But simply busting up companies? It won't address the underlying economic disruption happening, and if anything, it is likely to simply increase the amount of entities tracking you and risk of hacks.

This is an excellent goal, and Paul Graham has articulated the reasoning pretty clearly: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/886953410356011008

> Here's how to explain to people the distinction between fighting poverty and fighting economic inequality. If you're fighting poverty, you might say "Let's have universal health care." If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. And Larry, please don't start Google." Otherwise Larry's going to mess up your numbers big time.

Since reading that, I've realized that a major part of my political beliefs is that future Larrys should be unable to start future Googles in their current form, and in particular that I don't believe it's a just use of the powers of government to enable the creation of future Googles.

> If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. And Larry, please don't start Google." Otherwise Larry's going to mess up your numbers big time.

That's fucking idiocy. Or more accurately, propaganda from a billionaire with extreme vested interest in this topic.

It's pretty straightforward to say "Go ahead and start Google, and if it succeeds we're going to have some basic rules about worker's rights and compensation you'll have to follow, and we're going to tax a much larger percentage of your personal gains, but you'll still be very, very rich". At which point you're also fighting economic inequality.

So if a very capable, a hard working, effective person is able to increase their wealth by 20x, and in so doing increases my wealth by 2x without my doing anything, you'd be in favor of using the power of the state to prevent this from happening because it would increase inequality?

I think the first remedy should be prevent acquisitions after companies grow past certain size.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple innovated at their own in the beginning, but once the cash from network externalities started to pour in, they stared to buy market share and buy into the markets. Google did not invent Gmail (Postini), Android Inc, YouTube, AdSense (Adscape), Google Analytics (Trendalyzer), Google Maps (Endoxon).

But that also means conglomerates like GE, or Raytheon, or Lockheed Martin...

There is a place in the world for massive technologically focused organizations.

That reads like Graham is poking fun at Google/Larry opposers, am I missing something? He's saying fighting poverty by bringing up the bottom is noble, but fighting inequality by capping the top end is foolish.

BTW I agree with him in the sense that indices like Gini coefficients etc. are not comprehensive enough, and optimizing for simple numbers leads to distorted outcomes. I also agree with you in the sense that top heavy players in the economy are harmful to the extent that they seek rent and prevent competition.

> People who say economic inequality is bad and should be decreased don't realize they're saying this, but they are. Which is my point.

Sounds like Paul Graham was saying that stopping founders is some unstated but believed goal, and is a poor one.

Awesome, upvoted for more visibility. Who needs advancements in medicine, tech, science? Not us! Everyone’s the same, everyone’s equal, everyone’s the lowest common denominator!!

But Google (the search engine) is one of the greatest gifts to humanity that ever existed!

That some people made a few $100B on it is nothing compared to the value it's given humanity.

I disagree with these proposals, and think the sights should be aimed at companies like Verizon and Comcast, but at least Warren's proposals tend to be coherent. Although, it isn't too hard to be a "policy pacesetter" on the democratic side these days -- they lack any semblance of unified vision, and so far we have been given 3 magical proposals for legislation for fixing all the worlds problem lacking any coherent way to pay for them other than a bunch of magic handwaving and "let's just tax millionaires and billionaires more" -- the most atrocious of them being the "New Green Deal", and the second most atrocious is the "Medicaid for all"

Given recently how AOC and her cohorts were flat out embarrassed by the NY state budget director and given a lesson in basic financial literacy and economics, I think the freshman and sophomore democrats should probably lay low for a while and learn a thing or two from the adults in the room.

What's interesting about this proposal is it goes after "proprietary marketplaces".[1] Anti-trust has historically focused on breaking up huge companies that have acquired/merged with their competition. She's recognizing that another lever of power in the world: owning the platform.

Lots of tech "monopoly" power comes from network effects. Once you're Google or Amazon you don't necessarily need to buy up all the other search engines or ecommerce platforms. They can't even get off the ground.

Also interesting: she doesn't mention Apple at all. Yet they run one of the biggest platforms, and their cut (which they call "service revenue") is one of the highest growth categories for them.

[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

This is 2019. We have come up with so many correct tech solutions to problems, like inventing the Internet Protocol Suite and so on, where we once needed government. We have email instead of the post office. Desktop printing instead of the printing press. Xerox copiers were a game changer back in the day.

Why do we need government’s help to break up these monopolies? When AOL literally was the place everyone went to just be ONLINE, it semed unstoppable. Then came the Web, with its permissionless nature, and over time it completely took over, and led to trillions of dollars of new value. The Web is the plarform on which Google, Amazon, Facebook, built their businesses, companies that would never get permission do that on top of AOL.

Now we need something similar to disrupt Google, Facebook, Amazon. I believe Wordpress was an early start, and indeed powers 30% of all websites today. But you need four things:

1) Open source and permissionless platform

2) A unified Social Operating System with well designed components for user accounts, permissions, realtime notifications, payments etc. like the graphical OSes had windows, menus and so on. A well-designed cathedral architecture like BSD.

3) A permissionless plugin system and marketplace where anyone could develop their own components and package them into plugins and apps, and sell them to communities.

4) A layer where you could go between many different domains and have a seamless social experience. This is key.

I am really passionate about this. I have put my money where my mouth is - my company Qbix has reinvested half a million dollars over the last seven years to build a platform to do just that.

What I said is just the surface. Please watch this video to understand in depthwhat I mean:

https://youtu.be/OzXnVSZbvAw

Would love to hear your thoughts.

I don't have any insight into the rationale behind the HQ2 search beyond what was reported in the media, but I've long thought that planning for a potential government-forced break up was part of it. A preemptive segregation of business units will help their case if/when this gains some steam.

This seems like a terrible thing to campaign on. There are plenty of other more important issues to deal with. Maybe not everyone, but most people I talk to absolutely love Amazon and the convenience it offers them. Definitely not going to win in the court of public opinion.

Just my 2 cents: Apple currently offers a great user experience in terms of app quality, stability, design, etc... That's because they have a total control over what can and what can't be uploaded to their app store. They run extensive analysis over each one of the apps that are being submitted to the app store and they reserve their right to reject an app even if the slightest bug occurs. That, at the end of the day, turns into a very positive user experience. My question is: Would it be actually good for the end user if Apple is forced to lose control over the app store?

Enforcing the use of open, federated, interoperable standards when they're technically feasible would be a lot more productive than the crude approach of simply breaking up the companies. To the extent that there is a competition concern it's due to network effects, and open, interoperable standards would go a long way towards resolving these. Even for Amazon, it's only the "UX"-related company that needs to be broken away from the rest. That company would then face an incentive to interoperate will all sorts of suppliers on an equitable basis.

This would require a level of vision & planning we're not likely to see from political leaders, but I agree this is the best take here.

If the goal of antitrust action is to keep the free market competitive, I think a better way to achieve this than enforcing a breakup of big companies is by legally requiring standards for open protocols that allow for competitors to interface with each other and compete on their service quality rather than their network size.

How this would be done is a hard question without an easy answer. But breaking apart Facebook from Whatsapp isn't going to make it any easier for a new social network or a new messaging app to break into the space. Typically new social products can only enter a saturated market by targeting a niche and then expanding (e.g. Signal on a privacy/security focus or Discord on a gaming focus). Enforcing some level of open protocol makes it possible to try a new product without customers giving up because "oh but my friends aren't on here"

Companies do get spun off all the time, if it's determined to benefit shareholders. Why should the government take on this role? It's doubtful they would make decisions that are in the best fiduciary interest of the stock holders, the employees, and the customers. Generally it's best to let market forces play out. Amazon, Facebook & the Goog are pretty massive right now, but things change quickly. Ten years from now, there may be new behemoths that dwarf these companies even as these companies now dwarf former titans like Microsoft and IBM.

I’m curious what people think this would mean for hiring? If all of a sudden there a 8 or 9 smaller, but still quite large, giants competing for talent, I could imagine competing for talent would hit fever pitch.

You shouldn't be resolving such issues after the fact. If the FTC or the DOJ AD weren't diminished into such seemingly titular existences, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

She complains that the problem is lax enforcement of existing antitrust laws and her solution is, instead of enforcement of existing antitrust laws, radical new antitrust laws that do not focus on conduct or evidence of consumer harm?

Not only do I think the particular policy is ill-conceived, but the preference for legislation when the entire premise is an assessment that existing law is unenforced rather than defective is even more worrying. And I say that as someone who has up to this point seen Warren as probably the strongest 2020 candidate.

The more I think about this the more I focus on the Amazon case.

Amazon's core competency is logistics. They would not exist at anything like their current scale if they couldn't do 2-day delivery. That's what really gives them a leg up vs doing a Google search, finding a small e-commerce ship that sells what you want, and getting the product.

Breaking that into an independent service-- if it's possible at all-- would have far more impact, and possibly more positive impact, than anything involving house brands or an ec2 split.

I used to work at Amazon and the idea of spinning out Marketplace just seems unworkable. It's like saying that Microsoft should spin out Xbox... they are 100% dependent on each other.

The easiest target would be for Amazon to spin out AWS.

I choose not to use Amazon. I choose not to use Facebook.

Very difficult to not interact with Google...

I choose not to use Verizon... however COMCAST is TERRRIBLE and along with Verizon, they have shut down every mom-and-pop ISP and are responsible for the wholesale elimination of robust, in-place copper from the consumer and business markets.

Senator Warren, please add Comcast\Verizon to this list. That would get my vote... either that or slapping Ajit Pai for me next time you see him. Thanks.

Do you somehow choose to avoid everything hosted on AWS? How do you avoid the wider societal effects of Facebook, and how do you avoid their collection of data on you via third parties?

The real problem here is the culture that the current crop of entrepreneurs grew up in. No one one wan't to take time to build and grow a company anymore as it is unglamorous. Most of them are just looking to generate hype and sell to any Big Tech corp that throws cash at them as soon as possible.

As long as this culture remains in place, breaking big tech companies won't work. New ones will crop up and everything will continue.

This is one reason I still support Bernie over Warren, his ideas are more sound, and he has a purpose. I feel like Warren can come off fringe on a lot of things, and is really just trying to make herself appear progressive, she tosses out ideas into the progressive ether to see which ones will 'stick' per se and drops others. Some days she sounds on point and very intelligent, and some days she does shit like this and feels completely out of touch.

She's also very self-serving and has no sense of loyalty to other left-leaning politicians - else she might've backed Bernie from day one in 2016, instead of play things 'safe'. Her playing safe hurt her career more than anything else ever will in my opinion.

That aside, I don't think breaking up google, fb, amazon will do much...if I were to break them up, I think the only thing I'd do is perhaps have them split their cloud services from their other offerings, and maybe media services -- youtube | amazon prime video, but it's small potatoes.

I think a MUCH bigger issue is media consolodation -- when 1-2 CEO's control 80% of the media and thus the 'message' that people see, that's a much scarier proposition.

For example Sinclair Broadcasting I think owns something like 90% of local broadcasting stations now - and they send talking points and control what newscasters say in order to get political messages out - it's basically propaganda that they control, and it's very powerful esp in the wrong hands.

Comcast/nbc/hulu, att/time warner, disney/fox/espn/etc are all companies that probably are more dangerous than google/fb/amazon (w/ the exception that FB really needs to get it's privacy shit together or just die...), and if you're going after big tech why not Apple/Microsoft, Microsoft is as big if not bigger than it was when they had their antitrust case, Apple is the biggest company in the world ? Maybe we should also have a 25BN = auto-breakup for banks, since banks caused the last great recession, and are obviously dangerous when they get too big to fail.

Or maybe instead of breaking up companies we just figure out ways to tax them better -- esp. on speculation and at the investment layer, so that the money they make that 'you - the politician' feel they shouldn't be making is used for the benefit of society as well as enrichment of the CEO and their ilk.

You might be able to divide Amazon into two distinct pieces (retail and cloud services), but I don't know how you'd even start with a company like Google or Facebook. Most of the services offered by those two are only justified by the amount of data they provide for ad targeting. You can't take away those services without ruining their ad-revenue model.

Amazon is a "marketplace". Like "Google Play" or iTunes. This seems very different situation.

As a progressive, I really want to support Warren but her policies need to solid. I am concerned the left is running off the rails with anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, anti-technology, extreme feminist wackadoodle ideas.

Can't just Bernie just dye his hair and wear a proper suit that fits?

Just wondering how weird would it be if someone at the UN proposed to break up "monopolies" like China it the USA itself. And yet, I suppose a good parallel case can be built in support of this.

NOTE: I'm not dissing the monopolies act and understand the dangers. This is just a thought pointing out different yardsticks for corporations and countries.

Erm. Should we tell her that Google came before Bing?

The $25B revenue cut off seems really arbitrary and ignore different types of businesses. Some business (like Walmart) have super high revenues, but relatively small profits. While others are smaller revenue, but super high profits.

I know this proposal is just for tech companies, but it seems like it will create as many problems as it solves.

I know that Facebook has instagram and whatsapp, but wouldn't breaking Facebook up leave the still monolithic but waning Facebook proper together? I'm not saying WhatsApp and Instagram aren't massive, but am I wrong in assuming that Facebook is still a monolith regardless if it loses it subsidiaries?

Just off the top of my head, maybe FB Markeplace and Messenger get split out into their own companies? Maybe their Live feature get's split off into it's own thing too.

That makes me think that Amazon might have to give up Twitch too

Why is Apple not part of this? The most valuable company!! What apple does with integration of software, hardware, dongle, accessory and walled garden is nothing but a monopoly! The killing of iMessage if you switch etc. Maybe Amazon, Google, FB didn't pay enough money to Warren's election fund.

This is great because it starts a conversation about monopoly power that's long been needed.

This I think is one of the understated values of primaries and presidential elections. Even if Warren is elected and unable to get legislation passed, she has moved this particular conversation forward.

Warren's original post, Here’s how we can break up Big Tech:

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

While I agree that we should break apart giant companies (and not just Amazon, telecoms too), the first large entity that we should break apart, is the government.

The only way to stop monopolies from forming is by getting rid of legislation that heavily benefits large businesses.

> ... the first large entity that we should break apart, is the government.

If you're talking about the United States of America, it is already broken apart. By design we have three distinct branches, due process, and free speech/press.

I'd argue that the government is already broken apart and is in fact a cautionary tale of how doing so can lead to waste and paralyzed decision making. With the House having a Democratic majority, and the Senate and Presidency being Republican, no-one realistically expects anything is going to get done. Add to that mix the layers of state and local government before it gets to the road outside your house that's in need of paving... I think that government is broken up more than enough already.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren said in a statement. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.”

True. On the other hand, big tech companies are the only agencies that are taking on big problems, social and technical. Break up big tech and many things won't get done. No ubiquitous high speed networks, no practical general purpose artificial intelligence, no indexed access to the world's knowledge, no voice interface minions, and so forth. Government seems unable and unwilling to do the sort of things Big Tech does.

Breaking up big tech seems to be the wrong approach and is likely to be more difficult and more destructive than it would appear at first glance. Better to enlist big tech to cooperate and make the world a better place.

Of the three I would say Facebook is the most destructive. I don't see articles on Live Science or Science Daily decrying the mental health effects of Amazon or Google, just unfair monopoly implications at Bloomberg and other business sites.

Youtube is Google.

I'm on the fence about antitrust action in general, but here's an assertion from the article that I think is completely untrue:

"Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business."

The possibility of being "snapped up" is very good money for venture capitalists instead of waiting a decade for an IPO. So regulating acquisitions by the big players may have a chilling effect on capital and, thereby, tech innovation.

In addition, the first mover effect is very powerful and should not be discounted. For example, the competition between Snapchat and Facebook was not as skewed as the outcome would have you believe. Snapchat had and has a large userbase, and is losing because of mistakes (including not agreeing to very good acquisition offers). I can't personally think of too many other examples of megatitans successfully squashing innovative smaller companies with an equivalent product.

This is a really interesting conversation but I really want to read the full proposal. As many have noted, what about AWS? Does Apple's App Store count as a platform? What does the data clause mean? Etc.

Will there be enough political will to get this done even if she becomes president? It seems unlikely that such severe measures would be able to pass unless the named companies help dig themselves deeper by not caring about the distrust and deep disappointment in them (Facebook for one doesn’t seem to care in the sense of really doing something better).

> He (Szabo) added that he also felt Ms. Warren is “wrong in her assertion that tech markets lack competition.”

That’s got to be one of those jokes that go viral. Most of the consumer facing services are heavily concentrated among less than a handful (considering specific areas, and not in general).

It’s time at least some of what she calls for gets done!

This topic is strongly connected with decentralization technologies since they are the most viable way that we will be able to replace the large networks of the technopolies.

This thread defines 'whataboutism'. It's supposed to be about Warren's new 3 page tech regulation bill but has more than 600 comments rehashing telecom regulation issues discussed thousands of times, without engaging a single point raised by Warren. This looks like a derail.

There are urgent issues with Google and monopoly, search, chrome, amp, android and youtube and once you combine that with Facebook a toxic predatory surveillance capitalism model based on harvesting and collating private data to build dossiers that is ominous for any free society.

But for the tech community on the frontlines of this project the old issues of Comcast and Verizon unresolved inspite of decades of heated debate are more urgent. If anyone doubted Upton Sinclars famous insight here is the evidence.

> "as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace."

This sounds very fair to me, India has passed a similar law recently - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/technology/india-amazon-w...

What about closing Tax loopholes, such that Apple and Amazon pay their fair share and Netflix does not pay zero tax ?

Netflix paying zero tax wasn't actually a loophole, afaik, it was because revenues were re-invested in growth, which includes hiring more people and paying more for infrastructure and such, which is something we want American companies to definitely do.

There are a million other things which should also be done.

Saying "What about these other things?" isn't particularly constructive to the discussion of this proposal.

There's nothing in it which precludes changes to the tax structure as a separate proposal.

The problem isn't the tech giants but how we are seen as cash cows of information and not as people.

Miss the whole point. The world largest is not American firm. Not even in IT.

Break yours and let others do it.

What monopoly do these companies have? What customer harm is resultant from their monopolies?

Most people are on the same page about ISPs so I will skip that. Social networks should be public utility companies or else heavily regulated and treansparent to avoid censorship or what is referred to as surveillance capitalism. Networks should be open for third parties in a regulated manner after a certain size threshold. This would for example prevent Amazon from creating a massive delivery network in a competition free environment and then use it to squash any new competition for decades and decades. People might have a choice now to use Amazon or not but as delivery prices decline the options shrink to the point that you might not have any realistic alternative depivery channel. However with current US political system that has money interest and regulations tied in a biased way towards concentrated capital these will likely not happen.

She's lost my support with this - too far off the rails.

Breaking AWS away from Amazon might not be a bad thing.

Honest question, not trying to make a statement...

Is this really a left/liberal/progressive/dem position and if so why?

I'm mainly on the right and so I don't have a lot of insight into why Sen. Warren would be taking this position. To be frank I kinda would have expected something like this from Trump, not from her. Tech companies like Amazon seem to be left leaning (just looking at Bezos and his investment in WaPo). Wouldn't Warren want strong left leaning tech companies? Why would she want to go up against them?

Again I'm not trying to trigger anyone or make any political assertions. I generally don't understand and would love the input of others for familiar with Sen. Warren's platform.

So Democrats are sticking to their guns with their belief that their problem was not going Left enough instead of realising to be more pragmatic and listen to people instead of ideologies.

Yep, she just lost my vote.

if you're going to break them up, it's going to be a lot tougher to keep track of their "anti consumer" behaviour

I like Warren. Also, I believe something needs to be done about these tech companies enormous influence over information flow. I don't think the solution is breaking them up.

Does legislature like this actually have a chance at passing? Or is this just bombastic liberal rhetoric to ignite the campaign trail?

Why is Microsoft never mentioned?!

If you came here to read the HN comments about this topic, I very highly recommend listening to this podcast that I've enjoyed yesterday [0], it's economist Russell Roberts interviewing Michael Munger; the topic is "crony capitalism".

[0]: http://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-crony-capitalism/

Seems like Democratic candidates are clamoring over each other to be further left, and I don't quite understand it. I supported Bernie in 2016, and even he is now too far left for my tastes.

Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left, and if they don't take a hard right turn after the nomination we'll have 4 more years of Trump.

> Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left

They lost huge numbers of working class manufacturing industry workers in the Midwest, who perceived HC as a tool of Wall Street, and rightly or wrongly, instrumental in the secular economic decline of their jobs and communities. This was literally reflected in a schism of working class vs professional class counties in the midwest, with the former going for DJT and the latter going to HC [1]

Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin didn't swing to DJT because centrist's didn't have a candidate that spoke to their concerns - that candidate was definitely HC. Even many centrist Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to vote for DJT voted for her.

Those states swung because DJT at least spoke to the working class' economic concerns in a way that at the time seemed authentic, while also invoking their repressed cultural anxieties about demographic and social changes.

Democrats should stay the heck away from the racism and xenophobia that motivated part of his coalition, but they would be fools to ignore the economically-left sentiment that put him in office.

And since DJT's actual economic policy has turned out to be the same Republican trickle down, tax cuts for the wealthy approach, the Democrats have an opportunity to expose that and run against it.

[1] https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2016/11/macomb_county_cou... https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/20...

if they are going to break up amazon why dont spin out AWS?

2008, Financial Collapse, Too Big To Fail, Banks Got Bigger 2018, Facebook Helps Trump, Too Influential, Break Up Facebook?

Posted below, but this just paywallspam for Elizabeth Warren's own blog post on the subject: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/9ad9e0da324c

Whoops. Guess she won't be winning then...

Didn't people say the same thing about Trump when said he was going to build a Wall?

Funny how that election turned out.

If, as usual, people are voting heavily against their own interests and more according to the lobbyist propaganda fed by economics 101 professors, then you are likely on point.

The US govt has some of the biggest waste I’ve ever seen. Tens to hundreds of millions on failed research thrusts that were extreme long-shots from the beginning. Govt employees that “rest and vest” to extremes, working 20 actual hrs a week at a FTE position and getting pension at 55. It puts to shame actual hardworking Americans who are outside the elitist bubble.

It’s hard to argue when the same side benefitting from big govt wants to print money to “solve” all their problems and shut down opposing virwpoints with such vitrol. One side is actively extatic by shutting down tens of thousands of prospective jobs while not getting that funding and revenue of their projects comes from those jobs.

This will go exactly nowhere. I want Cheeto out as much as anyone else but if the democrats put up Warren in 2020 I'm not going to be happy.

I don't exactly like her but this is a very valid point. Not like she will get the necessary support in a bought out congress (both sides)

Big businesses are the drivers of the American economy. Breaking them up will imperil the economy.

Why do we need the government’s help to break up Amazon? We need open source alternatives, line OpenStreetMap to break up Google Maps monopoly.

If you did not build it, you gont get to break it. How about we split Pentagon into 5 pieces instead ?

Conversely, if you didn't build the Internet, you don't get to break it.

If we're worried about concentration of power, invasions of privacy, and collection of private data, the by far biggest problem is Warren's own employer.

Once we've broken up the federal government, we can start worrying about these much smaller and less powerful entities!

I'd have to see the details, but I'm pro something like breaks up the talent monopoly that FAANGs have, especially in the Bay Area.

Early stage startups can't compete for talent in the Bay Area. If breaking up giants creates more competition for talent, then I'm supportive.

Microsoft is now worth more than Apple, and it used to be in the target of government regulators. What has it done right?

I'm not sure Apple can claim a monopoly the same way those other three can. How would you "break up" Apple when their business is largely focused to one market that has strong competition?

Google Android phones and computers running MS Windows provide ample competition for Apple's devices

Just say "no" to more government manipulation of the market. In fact, we need to rollback a lot of the ways government distorts markets today. See, for example: regulatory capture[1] and patent evergreening[2].

Too often it's government intervention which creates the very "problems" that they then turn around and claim to be trying to solve.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening

Anyone who thinks Google is out there demoting Yelp results is a moron. The much simpler explanation that Yelp is a cancer that everyone hates is more likely. It's sad that Warren falls for FUD like this and we shouldn't forget that these memes originate from Microsoft-funded AstroTurf campaigns designed to mislead European regulators, which worked because eurocrats are gullible. The last thing we need in this election are people without the critical thinking skills needed to see through a disinformation campaign. We need a candidate who can clearly see that Google owning a small thermostat maker is not one of the country's main issues.

Here we go, buckle up. With the amount of power democrats are likely to consolidate in the next few elections there could be some serious movement on this if it becomes a priority for the party.

I think the big three are way too powerful and need to be broken up, but doing so intelligently is a tricky problem that I don't have much faith in government tackling.

Zuckerberg integrating all the services yesterday seems to be a transparent attempt to short circuit splitting the company along these service lines, he knows this is coming. I'll bet $100 he'll soon be talking about how it's impossible to split out insta from facebook because of database keys and integrated AI or whatever.

At this point in the campaign, I think people are just throwing out ideas to see what sticks. If this idea becomes super popular on, say, twitter, then it will probably enter into the rotation of things she talks about at rallies and become part of her platform. If it doesn't really catch on, I could see it not being brought up again.

I don't think it'll be a priority because I'm not really sure if this is a real thing that Warren believes or if she's just throwing this out there to see if it has legs.

> if it becomes a priority for the party

I think that's very unlikely. Maybe in the far future, but unless there is some significant campaign finance reform first, the big tech companies have more than enough cash to prevent the "worst" possible outcome (from their perspective).

why are you bullish on democrats winning the next few elections?

This is another nonsensical plan, between ideas like this and 70% tax rates (that would certainly apply to people earning far less than $10M+ annually) there would be tanks in the street by 2026.

If there has ever been a monopoly, those 3 companies are it.

I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.

A monopoly means you are the exclusive provider of something. Amazon has a ton of competition. People are CHOOSING to use Amazon because they are the best at what they do, for now. It's convenient. There is NOTHING stopping you from using boutique websites, Target.com, your neighborhood supermarket, or whatever you want. You choose Amazon because they are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to work with. That is not a monopoly.

The question is what is the problem you are trying to solve by splitting Amazon. It seems that you are assuming the Amazon retail side will be split. I think AWS vs retail separation is a much more likely scenario. Btw. if it wasn't for the IT needs of retail AWS wouldn't have been born. Many small shops would not have been creating cloud computing as we know today. I am not sure what is the goal here and I think Elizabeth Warren is quite often wrong so I am not convinced that Amazon needs to be split. Companies like Walmart can (and do) challenge Amazon in many aspects and there are other companies like Ebay that are on the market. I do not think that Amazon retail is a monopolistic stranglehold at all.

Amazon isn’t a monopoly the way that AT&T or Comcast are. People have a choice and can easily go to Walmart, Target, or most any other retailers online or at a physical location. In this case, Amazon is winning by out-competing their competition. That’s not monopolistic, it’s winning at competition. Fairly, I might add.

One way they’ve grown is by allowing small companies to easily add their products to their stores. Good luck getting Macy’s to sell your custom line of trollface shirts. Shelf space is live or die for small brands. Amazon has a lower barrier to entry without the strong arm tactics big retailers have used for years.

Retail is often a middleman operation with exclusivity deals and price fixing. Brick and mortar is failing for so many reasons. It’s not that there are restrictions preventing fair competition, it’s that the old guard is slow and incompetent and likely won’t survive the old model of exclusivity on goods.

Independent retail isn't dead but it sure is limping. I've been trying to get a book from a local book store that specializes in computer shit for a week and a half now; they had to special order (even though it's not particularly obscure) and said it would be three to four days, but it still hasn't come in and I think they're getting annoyed with me checking in daily.

If I'd bought it on Amazon, I could have had it within hours. But I wasn't really in a hurry and thought I'd support a local business. I'd probably do the same again, but I can see why many people don't want to put up with this.

I think retail is dead for me. Other than grocery store for food and the drugstore for health care items, I hardly ever go to a physical store for any reason. I was at an Apple store yesterday to get an iPad fixed and before that, I was at a record store just after Christmas.

If Amazon was shut down tomorrow, I'm not going to start going to bricks and mortar stores again. I'd find new online suppliers.

Walmart did too, for a long time. They have had a stranglehold on vendors for vendors and were the first to kill small brick and mortar shopping.

1. Small brick and mortar shopping is still a thing.

2. Amazon has literally thousands of online competitors, many of whom also have physical stores that get tons of traffic: Walmart, Target, BBB, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, Pharmacies, etc., etc., etc.

Small shops are still a thing, but rising rents are as much to blame as Amazon for them closing their doors.

Yeah no one cares about monopolies anymore. But how exactly do you split up a search engine for instance?

Apparently no one around here has ever heard of Standard Oil.

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