Elizabeth Warren proposes breaking up tech giants like Amazon and Facebook - Polidicks

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-amazon.html Ms. Warren’s plan would also force the rollback of some acquisitions by technological giants, the campaign said, including Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s addition of Whole Foods, and Google’s purchase of Waze. Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. Dual entities, such as Amazon Marketplace and AmazonBasics, would be split apart.

Maybe it's time the government did channel ol' Teddy Roosevelt.

It seriously needs to happen and very soon

She needs to steer clear of convertibles and knolls.

I'd tackle telecoms first, but, baby steps.

Monopolies are seriously hampering innovation and creativity

its weird that if you commit a crime over the internet its a telecommunication fraud even though the government has decided the isps aren't telecommunication companies. The problematic part with this is how it would slow down the VC industry out west since acquisitions are like the quickest way to get a return on their investments and they rely on the big companies gobbling up every little start up

TE-DDY! TE-DDY! TE-DDY!

I agree. Telecom companies need to be broken up at the same time. Otherwise, they'll just pick up the pieces of Amazon and Facebook and sell it back to you in piecemeal.

It can happen, just play on Trump's hatred of Amazon and Bezos Bernie did that and it worked

Amazon and Facebook propose breaking up Warren's campaign. Oh wait they're just going to do it without input.

If we do this to Amazon or Facebook, we need to do this to every huge company, otherwise we're just giving other megagiants the ability to buy pieces of Amazon and Facebook, and making the problem even worse. I think that there's other oligopolies and monopolies that are much worse for consumers than Amazon and Facebook right now. ISPs and cable companies come to mind.

Maybe that isn't such a bad thing, though. The amount of venture capital flowing on the West Coast is ridiculous - you have companies like Uber that are deep in the red with impractical business models, but investor cash keeps it afloat nonetheless.

ya I think that all these free market hawks and other groups have stopped congress from properly shaping the economy and its no coincidence that we have such a disparity in opportunities because the capital has not been spread out across the country. My company wouldn't have existed if some crazy guy with a vision hadn't been able to secure funding and the technical knowledge from nasa and other research groups to create our product.

part of this is because any time such things are tried the very states it'd help resist it the most

so we breakup Facebook, whats to stop everyone flocking to another social network and making it just as big?

more like mankind as a whole, and its fucking disgusting

If Warren is serious about this, she needs to give a detailed plan. Serious details. Breaking up a big unified service like Facebook and Amazon is a difficult and complicated proposition and I can't see any way it can be done aside from making them sell all of the acquisitions that they've obtained, and like it was mentioned earlier, that hurts the venture capitalist market tremendously.

with facebook I think the goal is to break up their individual services, they own several social media platforms that don't compete because they've been synergized and integrated into facebook

It would probably take years for any one site to gain a similarly sized userbase to Facebook, leaving opportunities in the meantime to regulate further

While we're at it please break up airline companies.

The problem with some of these companies isn't necessarily that they are mega popular, it's that they have so many internal services that you use. Like for example, Google has photos, video streaming, movies, music, phones, their play store, books, blogging, maps and business resources, even their own office tools. They're in education and have an ISP of their own. As a user you can be in Google's Ecosystem and almost never need someone else. That's the source of much of the problem Id say. Google is first in searches, video streaming and sharing, maps probably, email, etc. Amazon has their main store obviously, but they own Twitch, got movie and TV streaming, own grocery stores, now they're getting into local courier business, they have movie and TV production companies inside of them. They're big, but they're also horizontal in how much they control. Facebook is also not just a social network. It owns a whole lot and offers many side services like Google almost at this point. If FB was the biggest 'social network', it might not be a huge issue. but they're big in so many other spaces that it's dangerous.

I'm not entirely opposed toward looking into restraining what I'll refer to as "cross-domain integration" like described here. My only concern is how it'd relate to vertical integration. Should vertical integration be similarly restrained? I'm not so sure on that. For posterity's sake, vertical integration refers to the different stages in production being owned by the same company. As a simple example, let's say that Company B is mining iron ore, Company B is refining iron ore bought by Company A into steel ingots, and Company C is buying steel ingots from Iron B to roll into steel sheets. If a Company D were to come in and buy Companies A, B, and C, then they would own the operations to mine the iron, refine it into steel, and press the steel into plates. This is vertical integration. "Cross-domain integration," as I am defining it, is when a company owns unrelated processes. The processes do not depend on one another, and generally don't even interact with one another. A simple example is Crest's Google demonstration: Photos, streaming, movies, music, phones, app store, books, blogging, maps, business resources, office tools, and Internet serve providing. None of these interact with each other in any way, but altogether cast a wide net across multiple domains - hence the term "cross-domain integration." I think it'd be worth looking into the pros and cons of limiting cross-domain integration. I think we're seeing first hand the potential damage that a company can do when it controls so many different, independent assets that people use regularly in their daily lives.

They can certainly carry a big stick, but the 'speak softly' part they're still struggling on...