I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/google-apple-cl...
In fact, most everyone I knew that worked for Microsoft in the 1990s became a millionaire.
[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/7...
Your statement is at minimum misleading, according to the article you linked.
EDIT: Reading it further, it's a terrible article. Yglesias is a hack. No Sanders fan, but this is yellow journalism.
Likewise, Warren can rail on and on about underpaid, "exploited" workers, but her own campaign staff are subject to this, as it is an industry standard way to run campaigns!! They like to ignore free market rates for other companies, but insist on paying free market rates for their campaigns - hypocrites.
What's stunning about Warren is her 180 on just about everything, from when she was an unbiased researcher/academic at Harvard, to her new Avatar as a progressive, socialist Democrat.
1. She argued FOR women to stay at home, instead of the universal child care narrative adopted now [1]
2. She's not for collage debt forgiveness or even for subsidies. She argues for students to work through college, and pay their own way, contrary to her position on the matter now. [2]
3. She's been a steadfast capitalist calling for limited welfare, v.s. the hyper sociologist welfare state she's proposing now
1. Amazon/AWS losing the Pentagon cloud deal to Microsoft [1]
2. Amazon driven out of NYC by AOC and co. [2]. And still people think Bezos is the powerful one.
[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business...
[2]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.syracuse.com/politics/2019/...
Also, keep in mind a story of Bell Labs - the innovation power house hugely responsible for tens of Nobel Prize winning inventions such as transistor and solar cells. You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this (only Alphabet is kind pf doing it these days)
And if they don't comply? Fairly simple. Indictments. Raids. Arrests. Asset seizures. Public shaming of employees and executives working for the company. Etc.
The way to divide up Google is into the ad network, the search engine, operating systems, and everything else. Allow them to contract each other on public FRAND terms to start with, but setup annual reviews to consider a bigger hammer.
If they play games with moving house to avoid jurisdiction, ban payments to and from them.
Google the search engine could charge an ad network a lot for the right to show sponsored results and provide analytics.
Android/Chrome could charge a lot for user data, analytics, have their own mobile ad network and app store. Android could also start charging a licensing fee to vendors
Etc etc
It seems like it just creates a lot of inefficiency.
For example, other ad networks can buy ad placement in google search.
There may be some completion in ad networks, most likely racing to the bottom since margins on ad-tech will be razor thin.
This will do nothing but make things worse.
Google being a search monopoly is the only issue. Breaking the ad business away won’t change anything except make things worse for the consumer.
Working out how to make search competitive is the issue.
It was always a mixture of both scenarios.
Yahoo prior to using AltaVista, Inktomi or Google had its own search tech - going back to 1995 - and its own advertising network.
AltaVista had its own search tech and its own ad network.
Lycos, a top 5 portal at the time, had its own search tech and its own ad network.
GoTo.com, very popular in its day, was both a search engine (acquired) paired up with its own famous ad system.
For several years AOL flirted on & off again with their own search tech, initially based on WebCrawler, prior to and after their deal with Excite. They also ran their own ad network.
Operating systems might have to get lumped into the 'everything else' bucket if they don't generate enough revenue through charging manufacturers or getting paid by ad networks.
Splitting up these things may not make any of the markets (search, ads, OSes, other consumer services, other enterprise/cloud services) more competitive, but it would prevent using monopoly positions in search and ads to subsidize Google products in other markets.
This happens all the time in the space industry lol.
That would drive startups away permanently
It's in Warren's program, although of course the devil is in the details. Lina Khan is the thought leader on these issues (I am sure there are others, but like Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro, they tend to get coopted by the monopolists).
Seems a lot like communist isolationism.
Companies have outsized power these days imo, but they still aren't at the point to compete with the United States military and resist the actual violence that be visited on their assets if they do not comply
The real effective argument/consideration IMO is the question of whether the technology MARKET is more prosperous /because/ of the centralization, and therefore leading to higher demand/wages, or vice versa.
Funding and profit motive are different things and optimize for different results.
Just look at the recent IPOs. We had one go sour and it highlights how rare those occurrences are.
Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.
In the Bell Labs system, the tax is the monopoly price paid by folks on their phone bill. In the other system the taxes are collected by the government.
There's a lot of money to be made migrating such taxes to the private sector where private individuals can take a cut.
This is one of the reasons it's often profitable to campaign against things like the public funding of science (e.g. the recent attacks on the NSF).