Should she be elected President of the United States, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) vows to protect Americans by breaking-up America's biggest tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple to foster true competition and innovation.
She also wants to effectively prevent these giants from wantonly selling the private information of their users without permission.
Sen. Warren outlined her plans to restore real competition in the tech sector while assailing the sins of Big Tech in a lengthy blog post published on Medium.com entitled "Here's how we can break up Big Tech."
Sen. Warren wants to ban companies with $25 billion or more in annual revenue from owning both a platform and companies that participate on the platform.
This will mean that Google, for example, will have to split its search engine from its ad business. Sen. Warren also said she'll nullify mega-mergers, like Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram; the merger of Amazon.com with Whole Foods and Zappos, and Google's acquisition of companies like Waze.
Sen. Warren contends the monopolies these companies enjoy are bad for other American businesses and ultimately reduce the choices of consumers.
Sen. Warren noted that Google and Facebook own the sites that receive over 70% of all internet traffic. This means these two firms certainly have a monopoly on the information Americans access. Both firms have also structured their algorithms so the information people see on their sites is at least partly determined by their own business interests -- and not the interests of their billions of users.
"Today's big tech companies have too much power -- too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy," wrote Sen. Warren. "They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation."
She proposes that to "restore the balance of power in our democracy, to promote competition, and to ensure that the next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last, it's time to break up our biggest tech companies.
She accused Big Tech of attaining their massive growth by relying on two strategies designed to destroy competition: using mergers to limit competition and using proprietary marketplaces to throttle competition. The latter is a favorite tactic of Amazon, which "crushes small companies by copying the goods they sell on the Amazon Marketplace and then selling its own branded version."
"We must ensure that today's tech giants do not crowd out potential competitors, smother the next generation of great tech companies, and wield so much power that they can undermine our democracy," contends Sen. Warren.
