Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential candidate for the 2020 elections, has said that she intends to break up the big technology companies.
Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. 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.
I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor.
That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
Warren later added that Apple, too, should be broken up.
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar, suggests taxing companies who profit off user data, and of course, there’s people like Bernie Sanders, who wants to limit the power of corporations in American politics in general. This poses an interesting conundrum for the American tech giants: they always pretend to be quite left-wing, and up until recently, that’s been an easy thing to do. Now, though, public support for Democrats might actually be to their own detriment.
Let’s see how long these companies can maintain their left-wing dog and pony show.
I think regardless of whether you’re an Android user or an IOS user, we can certainly agree that both companies need to definitely be broken up.
Apple has benefited greatly by using their App store to block the competition. Developers are also forced to buy Apple computers to develop for it. Pebble’s app on IOS for instance was delayed 6 weeks for a review (which in the tech industry is an eternity, and gave Apple time for their Apple Watch). Also, not sure if its possible to remove Apple’s crap ware yet on IOS (on Android you can). Also, developers shouldn’t be required to pay the excessive royalties to them. Even if you hate OSX, you need to buy Apple equipment (or pay for it on the cloud) to develop for IOS. Also, the lack of sideloading apps for consumers is obviously NOT just a security mechanism.
Google obviously has its own MAJOR issues, especially now as they’re creeping towards an increasingly closed Android Ecosystem.
Break them all up.
I don’t know… look at all those tech startups, especially social media/messaging platforms, that get multi-billion dollar valuations for having absolutely no plan at all to become self-sustaining, let alone actually do anything worthwhile. Sounds to me it’s still the finance industry that needs to be broken up. Big Tech buying up the competition won’t be an attractive option if companies don’t get rewarded for it in the first place. Break up the Big Tech of today without breaking up the finance industry just means we’ll end up with Big Tech under different names.
I don’t think breaking Apple is possible or even fair… Apple’s big business is the iPhone, Mac market is negligible compared to the iPhone and if you break Apple in two parts (iOS and Mac/Cloud), one will be super strong (iOS) and the other will be super fragile (Mac) and can’t compete. Also, Apple Cloud business is insignificant compared to Azure, Google or AWS.
As much as I’d love to have “Apple Computers” again 100% focused on the Mac and completely separated from stupid Apple fashionista products… I don’t think that’d be economically viable.
Apple doesn’t have to be broken up like that. E.g. maybe it’s split into “software” (OSX, iOS) and “hardware” (Mac and smartphone); then a third “systems” piece that purchases software and hardware from the other two (or other companies) and sells complete systems to the public.
Of course the first step would be to make sure election promises are covered by false advertising laws. That way instead of saying “we will break up big companies” politicians will have to be realistic and say “we will try to break up big companies (and probably fail)”.
The other thing worth mentioning here is that the either the politicians are misguided fools, or the voters are misguided fools (and the politicians are cleverly abusing voter stupidity to attract votes). You need to figure out why these big companies are bad. If they’re bad because they’re abusing loopholes in the tax system, then the government should fix the tax system. If big companies are bad because they’re taking consumer’s data and selling it, then the government should make it illegal to take consumer’s data and sell it. If big companies are bad because they use their weight to prevent competition, then the government should create/improve laws to prevent companies from doing anti-competitive practices. If big companies are bad because governments are too easily influenced by campaign funding and/or lobbyists; then the government should fix the system of governance,
Splitting “big companies that are bad” into “many smaller companies that are bad” will not solve anything and will only hide symptoms of the real problem/s.
Brendan,
You are right, politics has been driven by liars for far too long. Sometimes they might have good intentions, but far too many just outright lie because there are no repercussions for doing so and it helps them get elected. And that’s the thing about politics, people rationally vote for politicians who say they’ll deliver even if those politicians have no intention of following through.
While mega corporations are responsible for a great number of systematic abuses (regarding taxes, pollution, monopolies, etc), I really doubt anyone is going to be able solve these politically (either democrats or republicans) until we have political reform to make politicians accountable to voters. Campaigns are a gimmick to get elected This has always been a problem, but it’s bewildering just how bad it has gotten. The level of corruption and nonchalant lying today is out of control and yet we’ve still got politicians voting against reform. It’s very hard to clean up the government when it’s so heavily top loaded with liars who have no intention of solving the problem, only saying they will (ie “drain the swamp”).
Yes, fix the damned loopholes that enable these abuses. Realistically though many of these loopholes exists because they have strong political connections, so I’m skeptical these will be fixed. If people rightfully make it a campaign issue, that’s great, but don’t forget that wall street abuses were a campaign issue in the last election and Trump rallied hard against wall street interests, yet he completely flopped and never had any intention of turning against wall street interests, it was all lies just to say what voters wanted to hear. While his lying’s off the scale, other administrations haven’t done much to clamp down on wallstreet & corporate interests either. Republicans are more overtly pro-corporate agendas, but the unsettling truth is that corporate power and representation has continued to grow regardless of the political parties that we elect.
There is ample evidence that such big companies (as with banks) are harmful in and of themselves because the concentration of power and wealth becomes too great and they can dominate the market by entrenching their own incumbency rather than through innovation and meritocratic means. Not to mention the “too big to fail” aspects where we end up using public tax dollars to bail out private companies because of the enormous consequences of letting such huge corporations fail. With humongous companies, we just have too many eggs in too few baskets. Instead of subsidizing them when they fail, we should encourage smaller healthier companies to take their place – I’m extremely disappointed whenever government subsidizes big companies. Markets that are dominated by three, two or even one player are too rigid with too few options for consumers to make meaningful choices. Yet that’s where decades of market consolidation has gotten us. Competition & diversity are key. We should dis-incentivize mergers and consolidation that kills off competition and even encourage companies to break up voluntarily with a progressive tax code that rewards smaller/nibble more competitive companies. They can either voluntarily split the company up or automatically apply monopoly taxes. Of course this is all wishful thinking. In reality corporations are paying lower tax rates than the rest of us do and republicans recently passed a massive corporate tax cut allowing them to pay even less now. It’s a fantastic time for corporate oligopolies and monopolies.
It was worse in the past …I mean, you had for literally thousands of years ruling classes lying that they’re ~appointed by deity; like (sort of 😛 ) Emmanuel Goldstein in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” put it, usualy for solace they promised recompensation in fictional afterlife. We just got used to those lies / but the lives of countless millions were determined by them. Nowadays we at least have a fighting chance of living in contact with reality.
And maybe the impression that it’s worse comes from actually being able, in this time and age of the web, to verify claims; while we don’t do that for past ones (and it can be grotesque how biased eg. old newspapers are; go through archives once)
Anyways, in regards to the news:
What about Microsoft? 2 decades late, but still…
zima,
Good points, it might speak to my relative privilege living in this time and place. I know there were many times when things have been worse on an absolute spectrum throughout human history. Yet for modern US times, political corruption and lies today are very disturbing relative to the norms of my lifetime.
I can see what you mean. Although I don’t know that IBM ever set out to intentionally make open PCs by design. It’s just that the design was flexible and clones quickly became compatible with their parts.
@post by Alfman 2019-03-13 10:28 pm
Hm, perhaps it wasn’t really better also in the US during our lives – remember lies behind going to both Gulf Wars?
Yes, the PC was made quite open by clone makers, that’s why I said “by then”.
You could break Apple into Software / Hardware.
EDIT: Wrote this an hour ago, but only just pressed submit, but noticed someone already mentioned that. But, this would also encourage Apple Software to support different vendors of hardware, and also possibly lead to more app stores for the Software division.
To my mind the split is more Apple Media (iTunes and Film interests so they compete on a level field with spotify/netflix) Inc its hardware like ipod and apple tv
Apple Computers (iPhone/iPad/Mac and iOS)
Apple Dynamic (may have just branded them! – health and medical services and apple watch
This split for me is more by industry rather than hardware/software. In this way they would be competitive entities in each market without being able to develop loss leaders on the profit on other industries.
I agree, hardware and software is a natural split for any of the giants as it opens the ecosystem to new ideas and directions without really doing much damage to the whole. The current Mega de Bono like vertical thinking and integration seems very introspective, the giants have become a feedback loop of self-interest and by their sheer inertia they determine market directions even if those directions are not the best choice long term. While it served a purpose accelerating growth and improving reliability interdependence was good, now they should get rid of that interdependence and free themselves to resume genuine innovation which has clearly been stymied to everyone except those heavily embedded apparatchiks.
One could be excused for thinking that the giants are as poisonous to progress as big oil!
> if you break Apple in two parts (iOS and Mac/Cloud), one will be super strong (iOS) and the other will be super fragile (Mac) and can’t compete
iOS would be bigger than Mac, but isn’t it essentially true that the Mac company existed and financed the creation of iOS? I mean, I remember visiting Apple Stores that didn’t have phones in them, and the stores were still there. Since then, market share and margins for Mac have only gone up.
I’m not advocating for this to be clear (either the concept of a breakup or this model in particular), but I think if it actually happened the Mac company would be just fine. With a bit of luck, Mac quality would go up to what it used to be, which would result in more customers and higher margins. (In fairness, splitting iOS and Mac OS would presumably also increase development costs.)
Guess who won’t get elected as president? Most likely the big tech will put their money behind another Democratic candidate in the primaries, someone who will focus on ‘social justice’, not breaking big tech, this way they will ‘maintain their left-wing dog and pony show’
Where are the other big corps that affect Americans more? Where’s Comcast/AT&T? Where’s Proctor & Gamble? Where’s Luxottica (eyeglasses monopoly)? She’s targeting tech when there are far more areas that should be dealt with FIRST.
It’s not just big tech,it’s EVERYTHING that is consolidating.
I remember all the banks I banked with were local banks, until in the 90s they are started merging, and now there are mostly bloated abusive nation-scale banks.
They will instantly turn around and not be liberal once they start being lobbied. They’ve always donated to both parties, now they’ll just turn around and peddle how bad it will be for innovation, like Comcast for example, if they’re regulated or taxed.
I say good, bring on Sanders and Warren’s efforts forth.
The notion that Apple be broken up is stupid. They’re not abusive with their business practices. I understand why some here would want the company broken up…. those individuals have aligned themselves with competing solutions based on a “non-integrated” model and would prefer to gain access to Apple-only tech.
Apple’s primary differentiation is their integrated approach. That model keeps them out of some markets while it opens the doors to others. It’s neither bad nor good but different. It however does allow it unique advantages while at the same time making the company the wildly profitable.
The logic suggested here that it it is somehow wrong that developing for the platform forces said developer to buy the company’s hardware is a non-sensical argument. It applies “open” business model logic to that of an integrated one. It’s akin to Pepsi arguing that it can’t go after Coke’s customers without having their cola recipe.
I can see an argument for breaking up social media companies as they have tried to have their cake and eat it too in the way of saying that they are a mere platform yet they censor content like a publisher. If they are the former, then they can’t legally censor content based on their arbitrarily specified methodology. Should they choose to censor content then they must be held liable for the content displayed and the legal implications that go along with it. They can’t have it both ways.
Apple is simply guilty of being wildly successful. The democratic party seems inclined to punish companies that have benefited too greatly from capitalism while pushing a socialist agenda.
Is it not abusive that Apple prevents Firefox, Chrome, literally all browsers from actually shipping in their stores? They prevent this under a very clear goal of preventing any competition with Apple products. For a browser to ship, it must be little more than reskinned Safari/WebKit.
Apple doesn’t prevent Firefox, Chrome or any browser from shipping in the app store.
I just checked… Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera and several other lesser known browsers are all available for download within Apple’s app store.
haus,
Unless there’s some news that I haven’t yet seen, you are mistaken. Apple does ban & reject competing browsers. What they allow is for developers to submit wrappers for apple’s safari browser and to rebrand that as firefox/chrome/etc. Apple has a history of blocking users from installing 3rd party applications and technology because they compete with apple’s software and store. Apple’s restrictions are designed to control owners and protect it’s financial interests.
https://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-finally-launches-for-apples-mobile-operating-system/
Note that mozilla specifically took issue with IOS being too closed. Mozilla are extremely knowledgeable of how bad closed channels are, and you may recall they tried to build and market their own open mobile platform, but like so many other competitors (including even microsoft), they couldn’t complete with the IOS android duopoly. For mobile developers (and increasingly PC developers) a new reality is setting in where reaching consumers means going through not-so-benevolent for-profit corporations who control the market in order to reach users.
Some of us believe that in the interests of healthy competition, governments should step in and correct power imbalances so that we don’t get permanently stuck with a handful of mega-corporations controlling entire markets (be it tech or anything else). Capitalistic principals are fundamentally dependent upon having lots of competition. When capitalism can no longer serve public interests due to competition being non-viable, I think governments have a responsibility to intervene and remove the obstacles to competition. At the very least, this must include giving owners a legal right to install software from other competing stores.
A wrapper on Apple’s open source browser IS a competing browser. They can bring new technologies.
haus,
I think many knowledgeable people would rightfully disagree with this notion that a rebranding exercise creates a genuinely competing browser. And in any case, regardless of whatever naming semantics you use, you should still recognize how this can impede competing technologies.
You may not care about it, but I say everyone who owns a phone should have the explicit right to make their own software choices. I have no objection to your opinion as it applies to what you choose to do with your own phones. But the fact that you choose not to recognize the merit of competing tech doesn’t give you any moral standing to make that decision on behalf of other owners. All owners should have the right to decide for themselves with hardware that they “own”. I feel I’m stating the obvious here, but: you don’t own it, apple doesn’t own it, and assuming it was paid up front then the carrier doesn’t own it either. I think congress should explicitly grant owners the right to decide what stores/browsers/software/etc they want to run without interference from big tech companies.
If a wrapper on Apple’s open source browser isn’t a competing browser… then I trust you would regard Chrome to actually be safari because it’s just webkit with a google wrapper. Right?
haus,
When it comes to browsers, there’s a lot more than just “webkit vs webkit”. That’s just the rendering toolkit. And even with webkit, browser makers on other platforms are free to fix and extend the code as needed to add new features. Due to apple’s policies, they’re heavily restricted on IOS.
You may remember that apple was notorious for holding back HTML5 royalty free open video standards on the web because they refused to add them to safari. As a member of the h264 patent consortium, they have a financial incentive to block competing codecs. Since no competing browsers are allowed on IOS, this created a huge problem for open codecs. In a free market, browsers like safari that don’t support open codecs would naturally loose market share to other browsers since open codecs are a feature that most users and website developers actually want. But by banning competing browsers all together, apple’s technology doesn’t have to compete on merit, they can just dictate what users and competitors are allowed to have by decree.
Right now on osnews I’m using greesemonkey scripts to give me chronological comment ordering.
(I posted examples of this earlier hoping it would be incorporated into osnews, but it never happened http://vocabit.com/osnews/ )
These web extensions work on genuine chrome and firefox browsers, but on IOS users aren’t allowed to have this functionality because once again apple blocks the competing browsers and forces safari competitors to build safari shells instead.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-way-to-get-Google-Chrome-extensions-on-iOS
You originally said “They’re not abusive with their business practices.” My hope is that after this conversation, you’ll have a much better appreciation for why it’s bad to allow large corporations to dictate what innovations and technologies that users and competitors are allowed to use since that is an abusive business practice.
As cpcf noted in another comment, many corporations are guilty. My posts weren’t trying to single out apple, but it is important to refute this notion that this is only a problem for “the other side”. No, rather than pointing the finger elsewhere, we need to recognize the fact that it’s a systematic problem across the board, apple included.
No they can’t, open source status of Webkit is irrelevant here – those wrappers must use the standard compiled library included with iOS, no modifications allowed (like Chrome did with Webkit before it forked to Blink, but it seems you haven’t even heard of that…)
haus,
As FlyingJester pointed out they are guilty of denying consumers the benefit of competing technology and software stores. The assertion that the complaints are merely about apple’s success and/or pushing a socialist agenda are off the mark. Apple forces iphone users to rely on apple for software distribution, resulting in a non-free controlled market between software developers and users. Many have made excuses for apple over the years, but they all ultimately place apple’s interests ahead of owner rights and healthy free markets. It’s incompatible with my long held view that owner freedoms are fundamental. Ironically my strongly pro-consumer freedom position has pitted me against fans of apple, microsoft, and google over the years. If we allow private companies to strip away owner freedoms (whatever the reason used to justify it), the closer we get to 1984, where we can only do what someone else gives us permission to do. Apple used to protest this when somebody else was guilty of it, that’s the apple I want to support! Today’s apple is corrupt and hypocritical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
Regarding the competing software stores… that goes back to my argument about pepsi complaining they can’t compete to get Coke’s customers because coke won’t give their formula. That argument is to apply a non-integrated model to an integrated one.
Similarly, complaining that Apple requires developers to use their store to sell 3rd party products is akin to complaining that a retail store wont sell your product. They don’t have to. It’s in Apple’s best interests to sell a variety of products… and they do. But if they think one does their ecosystem a dis-service then they don’t have to sell it. It’s not like they’re the only market in town. Do you complain to Ford that they only sell ford logos for their vehicles? No, because to do so is absurd… so too is to argue that Apple be required to have other entities dictate what to sell and how to sell it.
You complained about pro-consumer companies taking freedom away? Name me a company innovating as much as Apple, Microsoft or Google in the computing space?
Save for maybe IBM and some of the projects there applying to Linux, there really isn’t any. Each of these companies offer different assets for different tradeoffs. Of those three, Apple is the least likely to sell your information… (Google being the most).
While I too would love to live in a world where you can have cake AND eat it, I just don’t see where you can have all the advantages you’re looking for (an open platform, while retaining all the security, retaining 100% privacy while also keeping costs low while innovation is high.)
I buy Apple because I like the integrated approach. I like knowing that I’m getting quality gear, can operate it relatively safely and without my informational data sold. I recognize that for that, I’ll have fewer options to buy less and spend less and I’m okay with that.
More people need to recognize that some tradeoffs are necessary to achieve on-going big innovations. To demand otherwise is naive of how markets work.
haus,
That’s a terrible analogy. Keeping trade secrets is nothing like using cryptography to sell hardware that deliberately & actively interferes with an owner’s ability to install competing software.
The apple store shouldn’t be compelled to sell competing apps, but apple should be compelled to stop prohibiting owners from go to other stores to acquire them. This is clearly anti-consumer & anti-competitive behavior by any objective measure. You continue using examples that are flimsy and don’t really add up. I can understand why it’s a struggle finding an argument that morally rationalizes apple’s deliberately anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices. I’m afraid that what I don’t understand is your motivation for wanting to do so. Too often it’s tempting to trivialize it as “he’s just an apple fanboy, and he’ll say & believe anything as long as as it fits this pro-apple agenda.”. Although it can be a convenient shortcut to chalk it up to apple bias (which certainly exists at times), I’d like to give you more credibility and benefit of doubt than that. So, I’ll try asking this as directly as possible and deliberately not referring to apple at all: morally speaking why should an owner not have the right to decide what he does with a product once he’s paid for it? Do you understand why diminishing owner rights for corporate interests is troubling to some of us?
@post by Alfman 2019-03-11 9:28 pm
That Apple 1984 ad was already hypocritical when it aired – Macintosh since the beginning was a fairly closed platform, definately more than by then IBM PC…
zima,
And Steve Jobs was the same control-freak arsehole too. Typical of people like that to accuse the competition of being what they are.
Apple does abuse its ownership of the iOS platform/store… (did you miss mention of Pebble above? And Alfman gave other examples…) Also, Apple is hardly “integrated” on the Mac side, those are just PCs for a good few years; integration of hw & sw on iOS devices also hardly brings anything unique to the table, especially since hw can’t sustain its main differentiating factor, peak perf, for more than a few s.
Surely you largely mean “communism”… (as in People’s Republic of China)
The ones that need the breakup are Google and Facebook both of them are scary just how intrusive they are they even have info on you if you try hard to avoid there crummy services. this may be a controversial thing to say but web services and a operating system should NEVER be so tightly integrated to the point that you are tracked simply on where you take your phone with you. no should a application be allowed to ask tor the fishy types of permissions the Facebook app does.
The other issue is at this point both Facebook and twitter are the primary forms of public discourse. which is rather dangerous to be in the hands of a private company because they can simply decide they don’t want to host one side of a public debate. and that is the most damaging thing of all to a democracy. The electoral process is dependent on the open marketplace of ideas, you read both sides get informed and than vote for the side that closely matches your thoughts.
Only “both”, only 2 sides? How cute…
Any large and profitable organization is infiltrated by corporate psychopaths and megalomaniacs. To consider any of them morally superior to others is at best naive. They as entities are no different to society in general, and there are just as many crooks by percentage in Apple, Google or Facebook as there are by percentage in society. The real issues surface when these embedded individuals climb the corporate ladder and become crooks with privileges that Joe Average cannot audit, the crooks providing the transparency control the transparency. The Apple 1984 ad was surely sarcasm, yet another example of a guilty individual pointing the finger at other criminals!
cpcf,
Yeah, I also get frustrated by one sided viewpoints. This debate shouldn’t be just about apple, or google, or facebook, or microsoft… It should be about their collective roles in society overall.
I’d agree if the ad were made today, but back in the early 1980s apple was a small company up against industry behemoths, so the ad rang far more true back then. It’s just disappointing that with power and wealth apple became so hypocritical. Maybe that’s just human nature? I wouldn’t know from experience, but maybe we’d all turn that way with power and wealth? Either way though, I think the tendency of large corporations to manipulate markets, regardless of their underlying reasons, warrants preventative measures to ensure the viability of healthy competition.
There are two root causes here: Capitalism and Competition. Most of the debate so far has focused on targeting competition by weakening the most successful competitors. This is a lot of ongoing work that will have to be repeated over and over again. It has all happened before and the problem has come back worse than before.
Consider a new form of capitalism that causes companies to be valued by their net benefit to society as well as by their profits. This would be a single fix and would go directly to the behaviour we want to see vs punishing the behaviour we don”t want. Socially Responsible Investing is a potential guide model – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing
Ironically I think the tech giants would welcome this as they would get to feel better about what they are doing. Contrary to other comments, I believe the behaviour of giants is more environment than nature for those leaders.
Sorry you reply to my own comment – this could be as simple as a bigger relative tax on non SRI certified stock income, maybe with a scale for the benefit created. Super high social value SRIs would generate tax free returns. They already pay their tax in kind.