“In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, America’s big tech companies are being challenged on many fronts from across the political spectrum, from antitrust concerns to their policies on political ads and ensuring election security,” Elizabeth Culliford writes for Reuters:
Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have argued in favor of either breaking up or tightening regulation of firms such as Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has also stepped up its scrutiny, announcing a wide-ranging investigation in July into whether major digital tech companies engaged in anti-competitive practices.
Here are some of the candidates’ positions on Big Tech.
President Trump: Trump has stopped short of calling for tech giants to be broken up, as Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have, but said “obviously there is something going on in terms of monopoly,” when asked about major tech companies in a June interview with CNBC.
Joe Biden: Biden, who was vice president in the Silicon Valley-friendly Obama administration, has taken a more moderate stance than his progressive rivals on the issue of big tech company break-ups. In a May interview with the Associated Press, he said that splitting up companies such as Facebook was “something we should take a really hard look at” but that it was “premature” to make a final judgment.
Elizabeth Warren: She has called for legislation to restrict large tech platforms – which she would designate as “platform utilities” -from owning and participating in a marketplace at the same time. Under this law, Apple would not be allowed to both run the App Store and sell its own apps on it, for example.
Bernie Sanders: His administration would “absolutely” try to split apart the companies, Sanders said at a Washington Post event in July… His broad plan to reshape corporate America would also mandate all large companies to be owned partly by their workers. Asked how he differentiates himself from Warren on major issues, Sanders told ABC in October: “Elizabeth considers herself – if I got the quote correctly – to be a capitalist to her bones. I don’t.”
MacDailyNews Take: More candidates’ positions are covered in the full article.
It’ll be very interesting to see the breakdown of political candidate contributions from employees of the big tech firms during the 2020 race.
Please keep the discussion civil and on-topic. Off-topic posts and ad hominem attacks will be deleted and those who post such comments will be moderated/blocked. Permanent loss of screen name could also result.