Several Democratic presidential candidates
think they have the solution: breaking up
the companies on antitrust grounds. Cicilline
has called that “a last resort,” but the idea has
currency with both major political parties,
including at the White House.
Trump noted the huge fines imposed by European
regulators on the biggest tech companies.
“We are going to be looking at them differently,”
he said in an interview on CNBC.
“We should be doing what (the Europeans)
are doing,” Trump said. “Obviously, there is
something going on in terms of monopoly.”
The tech giants have mostly declined to
comment on the antitrust investigations.
Google has said that scrutiny from lawmakers
and regulators “often improves our products
and the policies that govern them,” and that in
some areas, such as data protection, laws need
to be updated.
Facebook executives have been calling broadly
for regulation while explicitly rejecting the idea
of breaking up “a successful American company.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called for new rules
in four areas: harmful content, election integrity,
privacy and data portability.
When Democratic presidential contender
Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted in April that
tech giants like Amazon should be broken up,
Amazon tweeted back, “Walmart is much larger.”
And Apple has countered a legal challenge to its
management of the App Store by saying it “will
prevail when the facts are presented and the
App Store is not a monopoly by any metric.”
In hearings and closed-door work over coming
months, lawmakers in the House aim to unpeel
the complex onion of the tech industry’s
dominance. They are expected to summon the
antfer
(Antfer)
#1