Don’t Break Up Tech

by Jack DeGonia ‘19

Elizabeth Warren, one of the democratic candidates for president in 2020, is planning on dissolving parts of large tech companies, most notably Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, among others. She is hoping to do this to make the field more competitive and to prevent the emergence of monopolies. In reality, this plan would not only end up hurting the economy in the United States, but would decrease the ease of access and quality of services that many large companies are able to provide to their users, both domestically and internationally.

The division of the subsidiaries of these large companies would force many users to create more accounts and, most likely, pay more money for each of the services individually than they would have when all of the services were consolidated under one large company. This increase in cost for many users would decrease the amount of people using the goods and services from the smaller companies, decreasing the overall revenue of the industry, and ultimately hurting the economy of the United States. Warren’s proposal to break up large tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft will hurt both the consumers and the economy, creating more problems without solving any of the ones it set out to fix.