David McLaughlin for Bloomberg:
The head of the US Federal Trade Commission said he’s prepared to break up major technology platforms if necessary by undoing their past mergers as his agency investigates whether companies including Facebook Inc are harming competition.
FTC chairman Joe Simons, who is leading a broad review of the technology sector, said in an interview Tuesday that breaking up a company is challenging, but could be the right remedy to rein in dominant companies and restore competition. “If you have to, you do it,” Simons said about breaking up tech companies. “It’s not ideal because it’s very messy. But if you have to you have to.”
MacDailyNews Take: Facebook certainly deserves scrutiny, but Alphabet Inc. is rather clear cut:
No company should have control of 92.19% of web searches.
StatCounter’s Search Engine Market Share Worldwide, July 2019:
- Google – 92.19%
- Bing – 2.61%
- Yahoo – 1.85%
- Baidu – 1.21%
- YANDEX RU – 0.55%
- DuckDuckGo – 0.54%
This is exactly the type of situation for which antitrust laws were designed. The U.S. and other governments should apply their antitrust laws and allow competition to drive the Web once again.
This ‘don’t be evil’ mantra: It’s bullshit. — Steve Jobs, 2010