Breaking up Tech Giants

The economic power wielded by tech giants has been aided and abetted by the lax enforcement of antitrust regulations by the United States. It has allowed them to create an almost impassable moat around their businesses, while being able to bully, browbeat, and buy out any competitors who look remotely threatening. Calls by politicians to break up these tech giants are more than timely and need to be taken seriously by regulators across the world.

The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy worked with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to draft the net neutrality regulations.

The United States’ (US) Democratic Party presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made a radical proposal recently. If elected, she would use the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to break up American tech giants such as Google and Facebook (Warren 2019). Fuel was added to the fire when her campaign advertisements released on Facebook were taken off the platform, ostensibly for violating the latter’s community guidelines about the use of Facebook’s logo. Though they were restored,

Facebook unwittingly affirmed one of Warren’s central themes, that companies running large internet platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google enjoy disproportionate economic power not only in the economic sphere, but increasingly in the political sphere as well (Kelly 2019).