bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images opinion Don’t Break Up Big Tech

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.





The worst ideas in Washington are often bipartisan. Big Tech is about to learn this lesson, if it hasn’t already.

Elizabeth Warren is out with a headline-grabbing proposal to break up Big Tech companies, the sort of overly ambitious government plan that once would have engendered knee-jerk Republican opposition. Not anymore. Who says we all can’t get along?


When the senator tweeted her (understandable) objection that Facebook had taken down her ads attacking Facebook and other tech companies, Ted Cruz — in a retweet heard around the world — agreed that the companies have too much power.

Tech is caught in a right-left pincer, made all the more powerful by the populist spirit afoot in both parties. Conservatives don’t like these companies because they are owned and operated by sanctimonious Silicon Valley liberals subject to the worst sort of groupthink. Progressives don’t like them because they are colossal profit-making enterprises.

That’s why there is some chance Washington might get together, and along the lines Warren proposes, effectively outlaw the business models of some of the most successful and iconic American companies. It’s the most compelling evidence yet that, yes, we are losing our minds.

Warren’s idea to cleave off the platforms of the tech companies and have them run as “platform utilities” separate from the rest of their business is unworkable and is justified by a series of errors and misjudgments.

It’s not true, as Warren asserts, that the antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s opened up the space for Google and Facebook to thrive. Microsoft never got the internet, and left the space open for Google and Facebook all by itself, as often happens with a large incumbent wedded to its successful business model (in Microsoft’s case, based on physical computers).

She charges that the tech companies use mergers to limit competition and cites as an example Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp. It’s hard to discern the harm here. When the social network bought it, WhatsApp was available for a fee. Now it’s free and more people use it than ever before. What’s the problem?

She calls out Google for allegedly killing off its competitors by burying them in its searches. It’s not obvious that Google actually does this, although its search business inherently involves constantly making choices to try to best serve what people want to see. No government regulator is going to make Google’s searches better, or is qualified to even try.

Warren’s proposal is obviously formulated without taking any account of the interests of users and consumers, who are the ones who made the tech companies so large in the first place.

Why does Google provide a tool without which it’s impossible to imagine contemporary life — and has opened up vast vistas of readily available information — for free? Because it can monetize it with advertising. Without the advertising revenue, which Warren insists should be a separate business, Google has no incentive to devote engineers to constantly improving its search engine.

By the same token, it’s not going to help anyone to have iPhones that no longer come with or sell Apple apps. And would people really appreciate having to go to two different Amazons, one just a platform, one selling Amazon products?

This is all silly, as are the mergers that Warren pledges to break up, including Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods.

Under what theory is something untoward? Amazon doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly in food retail. Rather than taking over the sector, it’s spurring investment and innovation. The nation’s largest supermarket chain, Kroger was founded in 1883. It was slated to increase its spending on investment 200 percent in 2018, developing a self-checkout app and robot delivery, precisely because the space is so competitive.

We’ve seen the same effect in retail. Falling behind Amazon, Target invested massively on improving across the board, and in one quarter in 2018, had its best sales growth in more than a decade. This past holiday season it sought to one-up Amazon by offering free two-day shipping. This is the market working, not getting short-circuited.

The tech giants aren’t stand-pat companies. The top five spenders in research and development in 2017 were all tech companies. Amazon alone spent more than $22 billion. The development of autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and voice recognition wouldn’t be nearly as advanced as they are now if it weren’t for the work of Google and Amazon. The behemoth of yesteryear, General Electric, isn’t making these investments.

None of this is to deny that there are genuine concerns about tech companies. They need rules for content that honor viewpoint-neutrality and the spirit of the First Amendment, and perhaps there should be tighter regulations around privacy. Their business practices aren’t above scrutiny. But any real offenses should be addressed with fixes addressing specific conduct, rather than with a massive politically imposed reorganization across the industry.

That’s a very bad idea, and if you had any doubt, watch it win plaudits from both sides in Washington.