Lawmakers don’t typically craft regulations for individual companies. That’s for good reason: A law that specifically targeted Amazon, and not its competitors, would be seen as creating an unfair double standard.

Instead, Ms. Warren’s proposal targets technology companies with more than $25 billion in annual revenue that operate third-party marketplaces — a group that includes Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google — and proposes a set of rules that apply to all of them, as well as any companies that meet the threshold in the future. (Microsoft, which makes more than $25 billion in annual revenue and has a third-party marketplace in the form of the Windows app store, was somehow spared.)

The problem with applying a one-size-fits-four model to tech, as the industry analyst Ben Thompson has written, is that the large tech companies have different business models that pose different anti-competitive risks. The stranglehold that Google and Facebook have on the digital advertising market is different from the way Amazon muscles out e-commerce brands, which is different from the way Apple uses its App Store to force burdensome terms on developers.

The possibility of unintended consequences means that tailoring regulations to address each of these problems is important. A law that banned Amazon from competing with third-party sellers on its platform could also cripple Chromebook laptops, or prevent iPhone users from getting access to their iTunes libraries.

Rather than one giant package that crams everything together, a set of effective tech regulations would treat each problem discretely, and address each with surgical precision.

Split off cloud businesses. Ms. Warren proposes having big tech companies split off significant chunks of their businesses, like separating Google’s ad operations from its search engine. But she does not mention one of the clearest examples of oligopolistic behavior in the tech industry: cloud computing.

Right now, much of the internet is powered by infrastructure owned by a small number of giant tech companies that include Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These companies make a killing by renting out data storage, computing power and other essential services to other businesses, essentially selling the picks and shovels of the digital gold rush.