Sen. Klobuchar Calls for Antitrust Reforms, Tech Regulation

Regulating big tech companies and breaking up monopolies isn’t anti-tech, it’s pro-competition and pro-consumer, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said during Vox Media’s The Verge Live virtual event Monday. Regulating big tech companies and breaking up monopolies isn’t anti-tech, it’s pro-competition and pro-consumer, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said during Vox Media’s The Verge Live virtual event Monday. In her keynote speech, the Minnesota senator — an avid proponent for antitrust reform and tech regulation — argued that the U.S.’ tools for dealing with monopolies, tech or otherwise, had become ineffective in recent decades and it was time to “rejuvenate” U.S. antitrust law. “We’ve seen unprecedented power in the hands of just a few of the companies,” she said, alluding to tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. The idea of breaking up big tech companies has gained steam in recent years, culminating in the Federal Trade Commission filing antitrust lawsuits against Facebook and Google in 2020. Klobuchar is just one of several senators looking critically at big tech. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) famously made waves when she called for the U.S. government to move quickly to break up big tech companies. While Klobuchar acknowledges the critical role technology companies played in helping the nation navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic turmoil, she said it was just as critical to get to a point where “these platforms are tools of good and not tools of destruction.” This, she argued, means updating the country’s antitrust laws. “Our laws shouldn’t remain stagnant as they were 25 years ago, but it doesn’t mean we get rid of them. It means we change them,” Klobauchar said. “Our laws need to be as sophisticated as the techniques used by people who are messing around with us.” However, Klobuchar didn’t stop there. She also called for extending greater regulatory power to the appropriate agencies and more stringent anti-monopoly laws that would stipulate additional scrutiny for mergers between companies valued in excess of $5 billion. “If we are really ready to stop kicking the can down the road, we need to address the larger set of problems caused by the unchecked power of monopolies, and that includes big tech companies,” she said. Klobuchar argued that the rapid rise of big tech companies has come with a substantial societal price tag, punctuated by the “consolidation of unprecedented power within a handful of companies, power over personal data, power over what ads we see and what news we watch, and monopoly power in key digital markets like Google’s dominance of the search engine market place where they account for 90% of the market.” However, it’s not just about holding tech companies accountable, it’s also about fostering a competitive landscape, she added. “You want a strong and vibrant business community? You want more innovation and choices for consumers? You want more startups, including in tech? You want more black- and brown-owned businesses,” Klobuchar asked. “Well, then we need to foster competition. It’s competition between companies that gives consumers lower prices and forces manufacturers to constantly innovate to improve their products.” It’s that competition, she argued, that allowed tech giants like Microsoft and Apple to rise to prominence because the more established players like IBM and AT&T were not allowed to gobble up the market. But while Klobuchar advocates for strong anti-monopoly laws and stricter antitrust regulation, she said that doesn’t mean breaking up every big company. Instead, it means reversing acquisitions — like Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp — that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen in the first place, she said. Breaking up big tech companies isn’t “a radical idea. It’s simply part of competition,” she said.