The Political Realities of Warren’s Tech Breakup Plan

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has laid out an aggressive proposal to break up big tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook as part of her 2020 presidential campaign platform. Few of the ideas are ever likely to be implemented, but her proposal marks a shift in how presidential candidates are talking about big tech and could influence how the rest of the field positions itself as anti-tech sentiment grows among both Republicans and Democrats.

The senator wrote in a Medium post that in a Warren administration, any large tech company with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more would be designated as “platform utilities.” That would mean Amazon couldn’t sell products on the same platform that outside merchants sell on and would even bar Apple from offering its own apps on the App Store. She also advocated unwinding deals like Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s purchase of Waze. She called for tech companies to be barred from sharing consumer information with third parties.