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January 24, 2020 01:27 am PST

Bipartisan consensus is emerging on reining in Big Tech

House Antitrust chairman David Cicilline's interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel reveals the exciting shifts in how Congress thinks about Big Tech's monopolies.

Cicilline doesn't think Congress can break up Big Tech, though he moots passing a "Glass-Steagall for tech" that makes tech companies engage in "structural separation" -- for example, platform companies would not be allowed to compete with the companies that use their platforms. And he wants to do a lot more scrutiny of mergers in the future, which is an outstanding idea.

I'm worried, though, that if they start blocking future mergers but don't unwind past mergers, they'll just lock in the monopolies of the companies that did their merging in the past -- for example, if future Google competitors can't buy ad-tech companies but Google gets to keep Doubleclick, it basically guarantees Google's eternal dominance. I'm not saying we should allow future search companies to buy ad-tech companies, rather, advocating for breaking Google up on structural lines.

Also notably absent from the conversation: breakups of other industries, like ISPs, entertainment conglomerates, banks, etc, etc.

But I do think that the other suggestion that Sen. Warren has made is a really interesting one and something I think about a lot: the notion of You can be either a platform or you can be a manufacturer or a producer of services, but you cant do both. Sort of the Glass-Steagall of the internet. Its kind of an interesting idea because people go to a platform thinking, somehow, when they do a search, theres some neutral way that evidence is reviewed, and youre provided with a result from that search.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/T51xwveGLXg/glass-steagall-for-tech.html

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