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The cloud computing market may not seem to be an obvious antitrust target. It is very competitive and the years of price war between the giants have resulted in lower costs for these services. Is it not easy for start-up start-ups to rent world-class infrastructure?
Yes. However, the concentration of critical infrastructure among so few companies – which also each operate a huge consumer Internet business – gives these companies considerable power and encourages anti-competitive abuse.
For example, let's imagine that Jeff Bezos, the general manager of Amazon, decided to sabotage Netflix, which runs on Amazon's Web Services, Amazon's cloud computing division, to help the video streaming service of Amazon. his company. It could theoretically ask the Amazon Web Services team to slow down Netflix traffic or analyze its usage patterns to determine which Netflix indicates that the video streaming team Amazon has to copy.
To be clear, it is extremely unlikely that Mr. Bezos would do so, as this would be a scandalous breach of Amazon's privacy policies and cost the company a lucrative customer. But the reality, that companies with dominant Internet services also provide the infrastructure that powers much of the mainstream Internet, clearly illustrates the kind of market consolidation that Ms. Warren is trying to solve.
An effective splitting proposal could force companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to turn their cloud computing divisions into stand-alone businesses, much like the one proposed by Warren to dismantle markets. e-commerce. To adapt its analogy to baseball, tech companies would play in the team or own the stadium, but not both.
Get rid of the "app tax". Another easy and specific solution would be to prevent Apple and Google, the makers of the two dominant mobile operating systems, from taking unfair advantage of mobile application developers.
For the moment, any company that wants to sell purchases or subscriptions through an iOS application must pay what the software developers call derisively the "Apple tax": a fee of 15 to 30% that Apple saves on in-app applications . purchases and subscriptions purchased by users. (The Google mobile app store charges similar fees.)
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