The whole thing is a good read. I don’t have the answers but I think competing with these big companies gets harder and harder with each passing year. That’s a problem – maybe breaking them up would help but I think the process to do so is too convoluted and costly.
I think fighting anti-competitive behaviour has to be the first line of attack and even on the record America isn’t doing well at all.
And, again, none of this is to say we shouldn’t be concerned about big internet companies with too much power. It’s a perfectly reasonable concern, but just because you want to “do something” and “this is something,” doesn’t mean that it’s the something we should do. The way to attack the positions of these big internet companies is to enable more competition — and you do that by encouraging alternatives in the marketplace. This is why I’m actually hopeful that some of these companies will actually start to explore an idea of moving to protocols, rather than owning the whole platform themselves, or that we’ll see new protocols springing up.
Meanwhile, if Warren were truly concerned about “monopolies” and a lack of competition, why isn’t her plan looking at the lack of competition in the broadband and mobile markets — cases where we have legitimate competition problems due to bad regulatory policies going back decades?
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