Warren and Vestager: The Trustbusters of Big Tech

With Facebook, Google, and Amazon embroiled in numerous inquiries over privacy breaches, data manipulation, and content bias, the demand for accountability in Silicon Valley has reached a volume that can no longer be ignored by the public. Comprehensive antitrust legislation has been noticeably absent in the tech industry, which has allowed its largest companies to expand into other markets and gain an almost monopolistic dominance over any potential competitors. However, all of that may change in 2020 due to the emergence of two key figures, whose calls for stronger regulations have resonated with public frustration towards big tech: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, both of whom are ready to “go to the mat” and lock horns with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Bezos.

Throughout her presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination, Elizabeth Warren has gained a reputation for her willingness to take on major corporations, and big tech is a priority on her list. Her criticisms often focus on the lack of room for rising entrepreneurs to enter the industry without being swallowed up by one of the FAANGs—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google—which collectively hold a market cap of $3.1 trillion as of March 2019; such has been the fate of Instagram and Whatsapp, which upon receiving overwhelming success relative to other social media platforms were quickly absorbed by Facebook in a manner not unlike that of the popular video game “Slither.io.” Indeed, the senator’s proposals aim at undoing anticompetitive mergers and clearly delineating the boundaries within which companies can operate before conflicts of interest emerge (in particular, designating certain online retailers as “platform utilities”). While these policies are reminiscent of existing antitrust legislation enacted during the Progressive Era, Warren has the additional task of specifying the degree of overlap between “unfair” and “illegal” when considering corporate practices, which may prove to be the greatest obstacle to her plan. Professor and antitrust expert Michael Salinger at Boston University points out that “[t]hese companies need to have violated laws in ways in which an appropriate remedy would be to break them up. We can’t just do it because some politicians think it’d be a good idea.” Effectively implementing such a progressive agenda would be quite the balancing act, but it can be expected that a Warren administration certainly wouldn’t shy away from the challenge.

Margrethe Vestager is the European Commissioner for Competition, and has imposed numerous billion-euro fines on tech giants like Google (Image: Axios).

Interestingly enough, the greatest threat to the titans of Silicon Valley lies much further away across the Atlantic Ocean, where Margrethe Vestager was recently reappointed as the EU’s Competition Commissioner. When it comes to big tech regulation on a global scale, Vestager claims the prize: in her first term alone, she rammed into Google with over $9 billion in fines for unfairly prioritizing its own services above those of its rivals and levied a hefty bill of more than $13 billion to Apple for nearly a decade’s worth of unpaid back taxes from Ireland. Though the determinations of her office are subject to the judgment of the European Parliament, Vestager has pursued FAANGs with greater scrutiny than any other government in the world. This includes the United States, and many conservative critics have denounced the commission’s antitrust investigations as a hindrance to innovation; some go further and condemn them as anti-American. However, Vestager has argued that she isn’t opposed to the benefits of the services offered by software companies but rather to the lack of diversity in the number of businesses that is essential to a healthy market. “We need to ensure that large online platforms don’t eliminate these benefits through anti-competitive behavior,” Vestager said in a Washington Post article about an investigation into Amazon’s dual role as both an online shopping platform and seller. With another term as Commissioner to continue her work, Vestager is very well-positioned to make that happen.

Given the strong resonance between the messages of Warren and Vestager, it would be quite interesting to see a partnership between the two should a Warren presidency arise from the 2020 election. Between Warren’s exacting regulation and Vestager’s stringent oversight, Silicon Valley would perhaps finally be forced to bring the machine of technological progress to a moderated pace that would ensure its overall prosperity in the long run. Whether or not this would actually happen is up to debate, but in any case, big tech is certainly in for a good scare.