Presidential Candidates Said Interested in Tech Concentration as Antitrust Debate Continues
Focus on antitrust and consolidation in tech continued Friday. As the FTC held a competition hearing (see 1809210056), C-SPAN posted video of a critic seeking to break up platforms. A blogger said that won't help solve problems such as what some see as a tilt against conservative views.
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Presidential candidates want to learn more about tech, and at least six likely candidates discussed the issues with the Open Markets Institute, said Executive Director Barry Lynn. "We are absolutely going to push to ensure that the candidates [of] both parties understand what we're promoting and agree with us at least on the broad outlines," he told the Communicators. "We've been approached by a number of candidates." It's "entirely possible and it may well be likely" presidential hopefuls take stances similar to his, Lynn said.
Privacy, manipulation, potential for social media to interfere with access to news, and data breaches are among Lynn's concerns: "These are sprawling corporations that have their sort of fingers in just about everything." Members of Congress and journalists over the past year "made huge strides" in understanding the dangers, he said. "Their business model is to exploit the user" by capturing people's information, he said of Facebook and Google, noting their approximately $135 billion in 2017 advertising sales. Google, Facebook and Twitter "are threats to the free press," providing the information those platforms want to deliver. He later criticized Amazon's Alexa regarding privacy.
The skeptic wants to break off Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook. On Google as "a bunch of monopolies all tied together," he wants to separate its businesses such as mapping, search, YouTube and email. "We did this with AT&T in 1982" and in 1913, he said: The goal isn't to end those good technologies.
Amid "an important difference between horizontal breadth and vertical depth," Amazon operates "in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition" there, a spokesman emailed. "Retail is our largest business today and we represent less than 1% of global retail." With customer trust "of the utmost importance," it's "built in multiple layers of privacy protections into Echo devices," he added.
The Internet Association and the other companies didn't comment, other than Facebook pointing to its past testimony. Open Markets, which accepts "no corporate money," has funding from Open Society, Wallace Global and others, Lynn said. His group didn't comment about where it discloses funding sources.
Breaking up social media companies won't help consumers, blogged Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation Nonresident Fellow Niam Yaraghi. "While it is true that these companies have created very large monopolies, we should not neglect the unique nature of social media in which users will benefit the most only if they are a member of a dominant platform." The post said Facebook and Google are Brookings donors and didn't influence it.