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National governments have struggled to keep up with the metastasizing power of tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. With @ewarren now insisting that these companies must be broken up, @kanishktharoor takes a closer look. (1/16) 
Warren is the first 2020 Democratic candidate to make tech regulation a major campaign plank. She compared FB, GOOG and AMZN to the monopolies of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when behemoths like Standard Oil were broken up by antitrust law. (2/16)
Warren argues that tech giants stifle competition in two ways: 1) by gobbling up possible rivals in mergers and 2) by operating a marketplace while participating in that market (Google, for example, can boost its own products in search rankings). (3/16) ajplus.co/m6k63
Her proposal wants first to undo problematic mergers (prying Instagram from Facebook, for instance, or Whole Foods from Amazon) and designate the tech giants as "platform utilities" (like electrical or phone companies), opening them to regulation. (4/16) ajplus.co/ac969
That second prong of Warren's plan is key: It recognizes that tech companies provide essential infrastructure in the new economy and shouldn't be treated as mere platforms. @ilsr, which catalogs Amazon's negative effects on U.S. business, swiftly endorsed her proposal. (5/16)
This push to break up Big Tech doesn't come from nowhere. On both sides of the Atlantic, politicians, legal scholars, advocacy groups and even tech workers have questioned the unchecked growth of these enormous companies. (6/16) ajplus.co/cjwvf
Unlike the United States, the European Union has more robustly challenged tech companies. European regulators fined Google nearly $8 billion in 2017 and 2018 for antitrust violations. (7/16) ajplus.co/9pwgu
During questioning in Brussels last May, an EU parliamentarian told Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook should be broken up. The European Commission is particularly worried about FB's cavalier data-gathering and encroachment on citizens' privacy. (8/16) ajplus.co/5m9mh
U.S. govt agencies have yet to take a tough stance. The FTC launched a task force in February to "monitor competition" in tech markets, but critics are skeptical that regulators have the will or leverage to really curtail the tech giants' excesses. (9/16)
There is bipartisan concern about the reach of tech companies. Republican Senator Ted Cruz agreed with Warren that "Big Tech has way too much power." (10/16)
But on the right, discomfort with Google, Facebook and Twitter stems mostly from the impression they censor conservative political speech. Republicans invoke what is, in truth, a patchy lineage of antitrust, from Teddy Roosevelt to Taft to Reagan. (11/16) ajplus.co/hx4t7
Warren frames her proposal as protecting competition, a hallmark of free-enterprise thinking as old as Adam Smith which holds that narrowing the field of competition in any market – including digital technology – is bad for the public interest. (12/16) ajplus.co/hkhht
But for many critics on the left, the untamed reach of Big Tech points to a deeper problem: the increasing concentration of power and wealth among small, largely unaccountable elites, and the consequent widening of economic and social inequality. (13/16)
From @AOC's desire to reintroduce a 70% marginal tax rate to calls to revive the Glass-Steagall Act, progressives are recalling an era of vigilant govt regulation. Warren described the early 20th century as "a golden age of antitrust enforcement." (14/16) ajplus.co/ac969
Some advocate for a more radical solution from that era: wholescale nationalization. Why should digital infrastructure be "run in the pursuit of profit and power"? asks @n_srnck. Instead, these platforms could be collectively owned. (15/16) ajplus.co/tdhaf
Warren's proposal is an incremental solution to tech's rise in power. But governments are nowhere close to adapting to the new economy, in which attention and time (not mere capital) are the currency of the future, according to @superwuster. (16/16) ajplus.co/9xtgk
