[arrosenberg]

Google/Facebook/Amazon have been acting anti-competitively for quite a while. Vertical integration, concentrating industry through M&A, shady data practices.

A democratic country has an interest in ensuring that our labor and goods markets also remain open, competitive, and democratic in nature. We've made this choice as a country repeatedly throughout our history, and it's time to do it again.

[icotyl]

Many companies across many industries vertically integrate. Should they all be broken up?

“Shady data practices” is hand-wavey and non-specific. What do you mean? Many companies today (again, across All industries) have had issues with keeping user data secure, selling it to untrustworthy third parties, not giving users transparency or controls in what information is shared, etc. Google’s track record in these areas is far better than most. How does this necessitate a breakup?

Concentrating industry through M&A is a legitimate issue, in my opinion, but it’s also probably the easiest to regulate.

Our tech companies are the most competitive in the world, bar none. I’m not sure that cutting them off at the knees will help with that. ”We did it before,” isn’t a convincing argument that we should do it now, under much different circumstances.

[arrosenberg]

To a substantial degree, yes. Vertical integration reduces the dynamism of the market.

I used a cover-all term, because there are too many to really name. Facebook is a co-conspirator in defrauding American elections, Amazon uses their data to kill small businesses, Google has been repeatedly fined in the EU for using search anti-competitively. Those are just 3 tech companies, and doesn't get into how data is used abusively by credit agencies, banks, and other financial institutions.

Regulating industry is a fools errand, and part of how we wound up here. Breakups are the only self-executing, corruption-resistant solution.

Are our tech companies the most competitive at in the world? The largest companies have been cutting off our startups at the knees for a decade, so we have no idea how competitive we could actually be. It doesn't really seem like our big tech companies have to compete much at all these days, actually.