Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has supported her fellow Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren, in her bid to break up of parts of US tech giants in order to limit and control their ever-expanding influence and power over economy and society.
Warren, who is running in the hope of winning the Democratic nomination as the presidential candidate in the 2020 election, announced in March her plan to see major companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google – later adding Apple to this list – spin off some components of their businesses out of antitrust concerns. She proposed targeting companies that had revenues of $25 billion or more and designating them as platform utilities.
According to Warren, the size and power of these companies meant that they were stifling not only competition but also innovation.
Now Ocasio-Cortez announced she was endorsing this policy, said Politico, in its morning roundup.
The congresswoman described Facebook as a “communications, advertising, and surveillance platform” – suggesting that the remedy was to break the company up into its component parts. However, she did not go into much detail about how this would be done.
Ocasio-Cortez also voiced her support for Warren’s proposal to prevent tech’s most important players from acquiring more companies, at least until the practice has been investigated by the government, i.e, the Justice Department – as their power in the past grew through mergers that are said to not have been sufficiently scrutinized by regulators. And recently, Ocasio-Cortez spoke against Amazon’s ultimately abandoned attempt to set up a new headquarters in New York City – a controversial outcome that came after protests from local politicians and union leaders.
However, despite the almost universal criticism of major tech companies and the social media they operate, for a variety of reasons – ranging from undermining competition, democracy, privacy, to inherently unethical business practices – most Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about the issue so far have not endorsed Warren’s plan.
Politico said that Ocasio-Cortez embracing the policy meant that the idea was gaining momentum among the most left-leaning portion of the party.
