In a plan to break up ‘Big Tech’ Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to break up tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. What about Apple?
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Anti-Monopoly
Ms. Warren is running for president and 2020, and breaking up monopolies might be a part of her campaign. She argues that the big tech companies hurt small businesses and stifle innovation, and that they have grown too powerful due to weak antitrust enforcement.
To restore competition she proposes two things:
- Passing legislation that requires big tech platforms to be designated as Platform Utilities, and broken apart form any participant on that platform.
- Appoint regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers.
These are aimed at companies with an annual global revenue of US$25 billion or more, and offer the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties. This means that the company can’t own both the platform and participants on that platform. Apple and Google wouldn’t be able to create their own apps.
Platform utilities would also have to be fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Smaller companies would have to meet the same standards but wouldn’t be required to be broken up.
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Echoing the other comments – Apple is NOT a monopoly – Amazon is NOT a tech company, per se – it abuses its position in a multi-industry market place by a combination of monopolistic and employment practices better suited to the Industrial Revolution.
Amazon’s involvement in ‘Tech’ is a by-product of attempts to exploit the monopoly position it already holds and lock customers into their ecosystem. Echo, Kindle are two examples that spring to mind.
Anybody who claims Apple behaves that way, and deserves to be tarred with the same brush is clearly consuming narcotic substances. I have long argued that as the basis of Apple’s operating system is BSD Unix – I seem to recall, with eye candy it is anything BUT a closed ecosystem. Apple’s curation of CUPS being a case in point.
This is crazy. So besides the Steve Jobs “we make the whole widget” that she wants to destroy, she wants Apple to either a) give up the app store and then is free to make apps, or, b) keep the app store and offer no software.
To call this crazy is an insult to the crazy. She vague points to some bizarre conflict of interest in running your own store and selling your own wares along with others.
So BestBuy stores that sell their own branded goods with others, Sears selling Kenmore (owned by Sears), Costco selling their (Kirkland) brands with others, every major supermarket selling its own brand of goods with others, that and zillion other examples throughout American history, were all evil. Apple better stop selling its own computers and phones in its own physical stores and because it’s not “fair” to 3rd party computer, phone and peripheral makers.
Oh yea, doesn’t matter that Apple has a minority of market share in the industry, screw zillion years of anti-trust law, this lunatic knows best. Ug. Pathetic.
There is less than zero merit to this, unless you find merit in brain damaged ideas and people.
How the f*ck is Apple a monopoly? It’s like she’s going after them because they make a lot money.
She has rocks for brains. Amazon, and Google, because of their size and reach, have created more opportunity for more ‘mom & pop’ businesses who could not, otherwise, have the same reach and access to customers.
This looks like a case the “very” left of the political spectrum losing the plot again….
There is some legitimacy in the idea.
But it won’t go anywhere.
It’s just a campaign bullet point.
Posturing for the crowd.