Ten years ago, luminaries from the technology and policy arenas mingled in tuxedos and ball gowns, sipping cocktails and eating canapes in the Andrew Mellon Auditorium on Constitution Avenue. John Kerry was there. So was Ben Affleck. And, of course, Eric Schmidt was there. It was his party, after all. It was Google's inaugural ball, and Barack Obama, for whom Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, had campaigned as a surrogate, had just taken the oath of office earlier that day.
How things change.
Now, we have a major presidential candidate in good standing with the progressive left calling for the breakup of three of the most dominant tech companies on antitrust grounds.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) took to Medium to announce her plan to break up Amazon, Facebook and Google, much as the trustbusters did to Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company a century ago.
Warren contends that the big three tech companies (she makes no mention of Apple) have become too dominant, and have leveraged their market position to squelch competition and harm consumers. She frames the issue this way:
"Today's big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation."
Her answer is to regulate large tech companies on the consumer web -- those with annual revenues of $25 billion or higher -- as so-called "platform utilities," which would carry requirements for open, nondiscriminatory access to their marketplaces or exchanges. The providers of those utilities would be prohibited from offering their own products or services on the platform, so Amazon would no longer be a competitor with the small retailers that sell on its marketplace, for instance.
She is also calling for a series of antitrust actions to unwind mergers that have helped Amazon, Facebook and Google solidify their market dominance. So, candidate Warren vows that as president she would appoint regulators to the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission who would begin the process of divesting Amazon of Whole Foods and Zappos, Facebook of Instagram and WhatsApp, and Google of Nest, Waze and the ad-tech firm DoubleClick that it purchased over a decade ago.
Warren promises that her trustbusting proposal wouldn't affect the ways that consumers use the platforms -- that goods would still be available through Amazon, search still effective on Google, and people still able to keep up with their social circle on Facebook.
"Here's what will change: Small businesses would have a fair shot to sell their products on Amazon without the fear of Amazon pushing them out of business. Google couldn't smother competitors by demoting their products on Google Search. Facebook would face real pressure from Instagram and WhatsApp to improve the user experience and protect our privacy. Tech entrepreneurs would have a fighting chance to compete against the tech giants."
Warren is also proposing to bar the platform providers from sharing data about their users with third parties.
A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on Warren's proposal. Spokespeople for Amazon and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It doesn't strain the imagination to surmise that the prospect of splitting up Google Search and its ad businesses wasn't well received in Mountain View. And Amazon's executives probably aren't too welcoming of a proposal to bar the company from selling directly on its own marketplace.
It also seems safe to say that the whiz-bang tech companies so well exemplified by Amazon, Facebook and Google have lost much of their mystique over the past decade. To many critics, they have shed their image of the disruptive and noble-minded innovators and now seem more like titans of industry entrenched in their market dominant-positions and more than willing to by steamroll upstart competitors and trample their users' privacy.
That's certainly the vision Warren lays out. And in the populist fervor that is fueling much of the energy in a crowded Democratic field, it will be interesting to see the extent to which her pitch to break up big tech gains steam.
