Elizabeth Warren proposes to break Apple, in addition to Google, Facebook and Amazon

Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, announced in an interview Saturday that she wanted to separate not only Amazon, Google and Facebook, but also Apple, while the Massachusetts senator pushed further to the left of her many democratic rivals populist issues.

Speaking at the SXSW Technology Conference in Austin, Texas, Warren specifically demanded that Apple be forced to relinquish control of the App Store or cease to sell its own applications within it.

"Apple, you have to separate it from their App Store, it must be one or the other," said Warren. "Either they run the platform or they play in the store, they can not do both at the same time."

She explained, "If you operate a platform where others come to sell, you can not sell your own items on the platform because you have two comparative advantages." First, you've sucked up information about every buyer and every seller.Before you make a decision as to what you are going to sell and, secondly, you have the ability – because you are using the platform – to prefer your product to that of someone else. Another, which confers a huge comparative advantage to the platform. "

Warren argued that similar antitrust principles were "applied to railway companies more than a hundred years ago" and that "we now have to look at these technological platforms in the same way".

In response to the recent rejection by a federal court of appeal of Trump's Justice Department proposal to block the proposed merger of AT & T-Time Warner, Warren told The Verge: "In what the Department of Justice and the FTC succeed – not at all, and not well for a long time now. "

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In a long post published on the site Medium, Friday, Warren has targeted Amazon, Facebook and Google for dissolution, without mentioning Apple.

Warren said the big tech giants had used mergers to "limit competition", citing examples such as Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions by Facebook; Amazon is using its market power to "force" smaller competitors, such as Diapers.com, to sell to the company; and Google buying the mapping company Waze and the advertising company DoubleClick.

She also mentioned that their markets were used to limit competition. "Amazon crushes small businesses by copying the products they sell on Amazon Marketplace, then selling its own version – Google would have smothered a small competing search engine by downgrading its content in its search algorithm, and focused on reviews of its own restaurants from Yelp, "wrote Warren.

Warren, who recently denied being socialist this weekend, proposed two ways to restore competition in the technology sector, including the adoption of legislation that would designate large platforms as "utilities of platforms "and the reversal of mergers already approved, which she found" illegal ". and anti-competitive ".

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Rob Atkinson, President of the Information and Innovation Technology Foundation (ITIF), a think tank for science and technology policy, strongly opposed Warren's proposal.

"The call of Warren's campaign to dismantle big tech companies reflects a demented ideology," it's wrong, it's beautiful, "said Atkinson in a statement obtained by Fox News. "The proposal does not take into account that many of the large service companies provide free equipment free of charge, which costs consumers money. Divide large internet companies simply because they are large will not help consumers. This will harm them by reducing convenience, service quality and innovation and, in some cases, the introduction of fee-based services. "

"Breaking the big Internet companies just because they're great is not going to help consumers."

– Rob Atkinson, President of IFIT

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Warren herself tempered some of her rhetoric on Saturday by simply saying, "I'm not" when asked if she considers herself a democratic socialist, just like the New Representative. York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

"All I can tell you is what I believe – there is a lot to gain from the markets. Markets create opportunities. … But the markets must have rules. They have to have a cop on the pace, "Warren told an energetic crowd at Austin's Moody Theater Limits.

Warren's calls for major changes to anti-trust legislation follow his other, relatively radical proposals, including his idea of ​​taxing unused funds. More specifically, Warren has proposed an annual tax of 2% on each dollar of net worth greater than $ 50 million and 3% on each dollar of net worth greater than $ 1 billion.

But since Warren would seek to tax wealth itself – as opposed to income or some other type of transfer – without distributing such a tax in the same way between states, legal experts consider it unconstitutional.

Warren also said that Native Americans should be "part of the conversation" about reparations for African Americans – a move that threatens to bring his own story back to Native Americans.

Senator Kamala Harris, D-Calif., And her former mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, spoke out in favor of reparations for African Americans, but did not go as far as Warren opening the door to repair. for Aboriginal people. Americans.

Chris Ciaccia and Adam Shaw of Fox News contributed to this report.