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Senator Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, announced Friday that she wanted to dismantle giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
The first golden era of America began in the late nineteenth century with a multitude of innovations – railways, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated with gigantic managed trusts by "robber barons" like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and William H. the public is damned ") Vanderbilt.
The solution was to dismantle rail, oil and steel monopolies.
We are now in a second age of gold – introduced by semiconductors, software and the Internet – which spawned a handful of advanced behemothics and a new set of barons like Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of 39, Amazon, and Sergey Brin from Google. Larry Page.
The answer is now the same: Break the monopolies.
The current movement is bipartite. At a hearing before the Senate, I testified last week, Conservative Republican Josh Hawley rhetorically asked me, "Is there any reason to wonder about the increased pressure for enforcement of antitrust laws,? "
Hawley added, "Every day brings a new scary revelation about the behavior of these companies. Of course, the public will want that there are actions to defend their rights. It's natural.
Natural indeed. Nearly 90% of all Internet searches now go through Google. Together, Facebook and Google account for 58% of all digital ads (where most advertising goes today).
It is also the first stop for many Americans looking for news (93% of Americans receive news online). Amazon is now the first stop for a third of US consumers seeking to buy no matter what.
With such a size comes the power to stifle innovation. Amazon will not let any company selling its product sell any item at a lower price anywhere else. He even uses his control over book sales to give books published by Amazon a priority over competing publishers.
Google uses the world's most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over its competitors, such as Yelp. Facebook's purchases by WhatsApp and Instagram killed two potential rivals.
Contrary to the clbadic view of America as a focus of the entrepreneurial spirit, the rate of business creation in the United States has been halved since 2004, according to the Census Bureau. Part of the reason: the gigantic entrance gates erected by Big Tech.
Such size also gives the political power the power to get everything these companies and their leaders want.
Amazon – the richest company in America – did not pay anything in federal taxes last year. At the same time, he is organizing an auction to extort billions of states and cities wishing to have his second seat.
It has also forced Seattle, its head office, to abandon a plan to tax large companies like itself to finance homeless shelters for a growing population that can not afford the exorbitant rents attributable in part to Amazon .
Facebook has been holding evidence of Russian activities on its platform much longer than previously. When the news came to light, she turned to a political opposition research firm to discredit the critics.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who holds the world speed record in free fall, is one of the most admired to the most revolted on the planet, has just unveiled a plan to "encrypt" the personal information of all its platforms.
The new plan will probably give Facebook even more complete data about everyone. If you think this will better protect your privacy, you will not remember Zuckerberg's last seven promises to protect privacy.
Google has forced the New America Foundation, an influential think tank that it helped fund, to fire researchers who urged antitrust authorities to take on Google.
In addition, hundreds of university professors have been funded to write research papers justifying Google's dominance of the market.
What to do? Some argue that technology giants should be regulated as public utilities or common carriers, but this would put the government in an impossible position to control content and oversee new products and services.
A better alternative is to separate them. In this way, the information would be distributed via a large number of independent channels without a centralized platform giving all the content an apparent legitimacy and an extraordinary reach. And more startups could flourish.
Like the barons of the Golden Age brigandier, those of the second age have ambaded fortunes through their monopolies – fortunes that give them an unprecedented power over politicians and the economy.
The combined wealth of Zuckerberg ($ 62.3 billion), Bezos ($ 131 billion), Brin ($ 49.8 billion) and Page ($ 50.8 billion) is greater than the combined wealth of half lower of the American population.
A wealth tax (also proposed by Warren) would help.
Some of the early Golden Age baron robbers were generous philanthropists, as are ours. That does not excuse the damage they caused to America.
Let's be clear: monopolies are good for no one except the monopolists.
In this new golden age, we must respond as energetically as we did the first time. Warren's ideas are a good start.
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