Elizabeth Warren vows to break up Amazon, Google and Facebook
Senator becomes the latest US politician to argue Silicon Valley has too much power
Elizabeth Warren, a prominent Democratic senator and consumer rights champion, has promised to break up the country’s biggest technology companies if she is elected president in 2020.
Ms Warren, who made her name arguing for stricter regulation of Wall Street banks, published a Medium post on Friday saying her administration would break up Amazon, Google and Facebook in an effort to promote competition in the sector.
She is the latest high-profile Democrat to argue the biggest Silicon Valley companies have too much power, adding further pressure to the already embattled technology sector.
Ms Warren said: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”
She added: “That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.”
The biggest US technology companies are facing political battles on a number of fronts, including attempts to restrict how they use customers’ data and accusations of political bias on their platforms.
But antitrust action is emerging as one of the most serious threats to the business models of the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Earlier this week, David Cicilline, the Democratic leader of the House subcommittee on antitrust, told the Financial Times he wanted to explore a “Glass-Steagall” rule for the technology sector, which could see big companies forced to separate different parts of their business as large banks did after the Great Depression.
Mr Cicilline’s comments came just days after the Federal Trade Commission announced it was setting up a task force to look specifically at the technology industry — including mergers the FTC had previously approved.
Ms Warren has a history of taking on the largest Wall Street banks, and was appointed by Barack Obama when he was president to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau following the financial crisis.
Her reputation as a scourge of big business has made her popular among leftwing Democratic voters, and bookmakers make her the fifth or sixth most likely candidate to win her party’s nomination for president.
In her post, Ms Warren argued that Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp were one example of how large technology companies had misused their market power to eliminate competition.
She said that if elected, she would appoint regulators who were committed to undoing Facebook’s mergers with those two apps, as well as Amazon’s acquisitions of Whole Foods and Zappos, and Google’s purchases of Waze, Nest and DoubleClick.
Similar concerns are also being voiced in Europe. On Thursday night, George Osborne, the former UK chancellor of the exchequer and now editor of the Evening Standard newspaper, made a speech in which he argued: “The tech mergers . . . were allowed to happen because no one really understood these markets — and . . . would never have been accepted if they happened now.”
There are signs, however, that Silicon Valley is reacting to the threat.
Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, said he wanted to integrate Facebook’s messaging service with those of Instagram and WhatsApp, which it bought in 2012 and 2014 respectively. Some analysts believe the move was motivated by a desire to make it harder for regulators to undo those mergers in the future.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a technology policy think-tank, argued on Friday that Ms Warren’s proposals would hurt consumers.
Rob Atkinson, the president of the ITIF, said: “The Warren campaign’s call to break up big tech companies reflects a ‘big is bad, small is beautiful’ ideology run amok.
“The proposal ignores the fact that many of the services big tech companies now provide free used to cost consumers money.”