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posted by takyon on Saturday March 09 2019, @12:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the monopoly-money dept.

CNet:

"Today's big tech companies have [too much power over] our economy, our society, and our democracy," wrote Warren in a blog post. "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."

Warren said that big tech companies use mergers to swallow competition and sell products on their own e-commerce platforms, which hurt smaller businesses' opportunities to succeed. Weak antitrust enforcement also resulted in "a dramatic reduction" in competition and innovation in the tech industry, according to Warren's blog post.

With conservative voices decrying Big Tech censorship, internet activists decrying privacy violations, and now Senator Warren calling for outright dismemberment, Big Tech might be in for a rocky stretch of road.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:33PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:33PM (#812142) Journal

    Private companies becoming TBTF, or wielding unreasonable power allowing them to control people's lives and threaten their freedoms, is not how the system should work.

    What's unreasonable about the power that Amazon, Google, and Facebook have? Let us keep in mind that customers/end users of these platforms have even more power over these businesses than voters do over the governments. Because stop using a business's platform is much easier than stop using a government.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday March 11 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday March 11 2019, @01:45PM (#812664) Journal

    What's unreasonable about the power that Amazon, Google, and Facebook have? Let us keep in mind that customers/end users of these platforms have even more power over these businesses than voters do over the governments. Because stop using a business's platform is much easier than stop using a government.

    As a software engineer, even I can't figure out how the fuck to stop using these platforms, so I'm not sure how any normal user is supposed to manage it. I can't even order parts from Sparkfun since blocking Google; I can't post comments on most websites or login to most forums either all thanks to reCaptcha. Most news websites break due to jQuery that they just link to Google for. There's very, very few major website that you can access without your information being transmitted to Facebook through their tracking icons. You can't even pay for smaller subscription video services, because most of them just post embedded private YouTube videos, which is still Google. I can read Soylent and I can SSH and that's about it.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 11 2019, @02:16PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 11 2019, @02:16PM (#812675) Journal

      As a software engineer, even I can't figure out how the fuck to stop using these platforms

      I can. Notice that we're complaining about companies with very public services rather than companies like Akamai Technologies with nearly invisible behind the scenes services.

      I can't even order parts from Sparkfun since blocking Google; I can't post comments on most websites or login to most forums either all thanks to reCaptcha.

      Ok. So what?

      Where would Google be without its search engine data? Just another tracker company without a means to acquire the data it needs to track. How would Facebook be able to place those tracking icons, if it doesn't have a business? The whole thing is way overblown.