A month after Sen. Elizabeth Warren made waves with her proposal to break-up Big Tech, experts are still debating the merits of her plan. While many have agreed on her diagnosis of the problem – that large companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are anti-competitive and play an outsized role in American democracy and society – people have split on whether the aggressive anti-trust action promoted by Warren is the best way to go.
“There are a lot of negative aspects of trying to break up something that you just can’t anticipate,” said Carbonite CEO Mohamad Ali while speaking Wednesday with Jim Braude on Greater Boston.
As an alternative, Ali favors greater government regulation of large internet companies. “We’ve regulated IBM to separate the operating system from the computers, [and] we’ve regulated Microsoft, which actually allowed Google to come to existence,” he said. “Regulation actually works.”
But software engineer and 2020 Congressional candidate Brianna Wu disagreed with this premise. “’For whatever reason, our Department of Justice has been more reluctant to pursue antitrust cases against companies in the last few years, certainly since the Bush years,” she said.
Wu has her own reservations about Warren’s plan – primarily cyber security concerns, which she laid out in a recent Boston Globe op-ed. But, she writes, “overall, it’s a strong start to an antitrust conversation that is long overdue.”
According to Boston Globe interim editorial page editor Shirley Leung, the answer of more government regulation opens up its own set of questions. “And right now, the FTC should be strengthened,” she said, agreeing that regulation was a “big answer” to the anti-competitive answer. “But I don’t know what this brave new world looks like. … What does some regulation look like?” She noted free speech concerns as major mitigating factor.
And of course, as Jim Braude observed, there is a level of suspicion that comes with the fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has himself pointed to greater government regulation as the answer to the various criticisms lobbed at companies like his.
“Call me cynical, but if Mark Zuckerberg wants to be regulated … that means there’s something wrong with this picture and maybe we should be breaking them up,” Braude noted.
“I don’t think it’s really the place for these internet platforms to define how they’re regulated,” responded Ali. “I think it’s the place of all those who are affected to define it.”
