Monopolooza

Several potential presidential candidates for the 2020 election have expressed an interest in policies that would battle monopolies in the US, including in the tech industry, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute. “Well more than six of the likely presidential candidates this next time around, we’ve had extensive conservations with about these issues,” he said. Lynn hesitated to name names but said getting Open Markets’ policy positions — which include calling out Big Tech by name — in front of both Democratic and Republican candidates is a goal for the organization. Lynn also said he’s not sure Republican allegations of bias against conservatives reflect any actual intention on tech companies’ part, but contended it’s true that platforms are major arbiters in how information gets to the public. And privacy problems are also monopoly problems, in Lynn’s view — he said flaps like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal are a direct result of too few companies holding the information of too many people. Lynn also said Google should have attended the recent congressional hearings, arguing that sitting them out was emblematic of a longstanding pattern for the company. “Google as an institution has not shown, over the last 10 years, a lot of respect for the US government,” he said, calling the company’s attitude “patronizing.” Lynn suggested the government could start seeking to simply break the big tech companies up, for instance splitting off Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram into their own companies again. Breaking up Google, he said, would be more complicated because all of its services are integrated. One idea would be to separate maps from search and search from YouTube so that they’re discrete services. “This sounds radical … but this is something we’ve done many times in the past,” he said.