United States Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed breaking up tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google if elected to the US presidency in 2020.
In a speech she gave last week to a crowded Queens, New York, Warren proclaimed that she was “sick of freeloading billionaires” and announced her proposed plans to break them up to the crowd.
Senator Warren said that her proposed regulatory plan would reverse several tech mergers, and stop companies competing on their own platforms, which she says would then promote competition while at the same time protecting other small businesses.
The proposed regulation to break apart the tech companies would come into effect when the firm has an annual revenue of more than $25 billion.
Then on Saturday, at a technology conference in Texas, she doubled-down on the plan, saying that Apple too should be included in this regulation. Citing the App store as the main concern, she told The Verge, “you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They don’t get to do both at the same time.”
This latest proposition from Warren comes amid a string of progressive policies she has put forward since announcing her 2020 presidential bid, including a wealth tax on multi-millionaires, universal childcare, and now looks set to leverage anti-monopoly power in order to take apart the big tech giants.
Whether the proposed action will be welcomed, both by the Democratic party as well as the wider US population in general, remains to be seen. In a political sphere where tech giants are increasingly coming under fire for data scandals and privacy faux-pas’, this could be the perfect time for a candidate like Warren to take advantage of the increased anti-tech-monopolies and ride the wave into the 2020 elections.
