Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Break Up Big Tech Is a Debate 2020 Democrats Need to Have
On Friday morning, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced the latest addition to her already voluminous portfolio of 2020 agenda items: an ambitious effort to break up Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Sometimes, these tech giants' ubiquity manifests itself in unnerving but seemingly innocuous ways: ads for engagement rings when you're dating, or diapers when you're pregnant, or even—as VICE's Sam Nichols recently chronicled—cheap flights to Japan, when all you did was talk about visiting Tokyo within earshot of your phone. Sometimes, as horrified observers of last year's Cambridge Analytica scandal or the 2016 election may recall, the implications of oligopoly are far more insidious.
The Massachusetts senator outlines the details of her proposal in, of course, a lengthy Medium post; the aforementioned companies, she argues, have accumulated "too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy" at the expense of small businesses and would-be innovation. She points to the freewheeling use of mergers and acquisitions (think: Google and Zagat and Waze, or Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp) and frequent instances of marketplace self-participation (think: everything manufactured by AmazonBasics and promoted to the top of your search results) as two primary strategies by which these firms assert their dominance.
In the case of entities like Amazon, these anticompetitive maneuvers might result in consumers facing fewer choices and/or paying higher prices. With free-to-use services like Facebook and Google, the costs are a little harder to quantify. But because these companies don't operate in a competitive market, Warren says, they tend to get lazy in managing their most valuable resource: users' personal information. Among consumers, a fresh wave of nihilistic despair accompanies the news that, for example, Facebook's facial-recognition engine quietly scans photos uploaded by people who opted out of the service; people might not like Facebook, but what viable options can they turn to instead? If Facebook were less able to snap up competitors that could threaten its user base, Warren argues, perhaps the company would dedicate more front-end resources to its privacy infrastructure, instead of issuing perfunctory apologies after each time it fails.
Although "BREAK UP BIG TECH" is the sort of splashy headline that excites progressives and prompts Wall Street plutocrats to sweat profusely, the mechanisms Warren would employ to execute her plan are actually pretty measured. To combat self-dealing, she would back legislation to prevent "platform utilities"—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and any future similarly situated tech behemoths—from doing business on platform(s) they own. Under this scheme, AmazonBasics could continue to operate, as long as it maintains a corporate structure independent of Amazon's. Warren is well aware that opponents of anti-monopolistic policies often castigate such policies as arbitrary and punitive, which is why her solution is tailored to address specific, identifiable problems without straying far beyond them.
The balance of Warren's proposal is a pledge to revive antitrust enforcement, which under recent Democratic and Republican presidents alike has been very friendly to Silicon Valley interests. She points to Amazon's acquisitions of Whole Foods and Zappos and Facebook's acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as primary targets of the types of regulators her administration would appoint. Again, Warren makes a case here based not on abstract animus toward tech companies, but instead on well-established legal principles. (She is careful to note that unwinding these mergers would require the use of "existing tools" only.) To appeal to her party's left wing, she's presenting a big, bold goal; to appeal to more moderate voters, she's outlining a transparent plan by which she'd accomplish it.
Whatever you think of the merits of this element of her platform—or any of the others she has unveiled since declaring her candidacy—Elizabeth Warren continues to outpace the field in terms of outlining specific policies that flow from the general values she espouses. And regardless of how she ultimately performs in the primaries, her strategy raises the bar for all candidates by forcing them to move from aspirational slogans to brass tacks, thereby boosting the eventual Democratic nominee's odds of settling on a coherent general-election pitch. Warren, in other words, has spent a lot of time thinking about what she'd do as president, instead of merely wanting to be president. Her opponents would be wise to follow suit.
