Breaking Down the Latest Bipartisan Assault on Big Tech—And How It Could Blow Up in Consumers’ Faces
The Foundation for Economic Education cites Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray on a series of proposed antitrust bills targeting “Big Tech”:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray aptly explained how companies would likely respond to this legislation.
E-commerce platforms such as Amazon would have to take one of the following approaches, Murray writes:
1. Focus on its own products and services and kick competitors off its platform. This would kill thousands of businesses that use the platform.
2. Take non-preferencing seriously and simply turn into a very basic sales platform, offering up a list of products in response to a search. In essence, this would turn the platform into a high-tech version of classified ads or Craigslist.
3. Submit to pressure and spin off subsidiaries, losing the benefits of shared information and cross-subsidies, as well as the package deals of services it might offer customers.
Meanwhile, Murray explains that software or phone manufacturers such as Apple would have to make some of the below changes:
1. Shut down its app store and concentrate on its own products, locking developers out of its system.
2. Ship only blank phones with a bare-bones operating system that you would have to populate yourself.
3. Spin off its phone division, which means that the interoperable capabilities it has developed with its computer and other devices would wither on the vine.