Elizabeth Warren propõe "partir" gigantes da internet

Senator Elizabeth Warren Announces Plan To Break Up Amazon, Google And Facebook (Huffpost):

In Friday’s post, Warren breaks her proposal down into “two major steps.” The first would be passing legislation that designates tech platforms with annual revenues surpassing $25 billion as utilities that “would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform.”

“Amazon Marketplace, Google’s ad exchange, and Google Search would be platform utilities under this law,” she writes. “Therefore, Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.”

Additionally, Warren proposes disallowing these so-called “platform utilities” from sharing data with third parties.

The second major proposal of Warren’s plan would be appointing regulators dedicated to using current rules to “unwind anti-competitive mergers,” like those between Amazon and Whole Foods, Facebook and Instagram. “Unwinding these mergers will promote healthy competition in the market ― which will put pressure on big tech companies to be more responsive to user concerns, including about privacy,” she said.

Quando li só o título, pareceu-me dificil partir "gigantes" em ramos que têm grandes economias de escala e/ou de rede - nomeadamente o Facebook, cuja utilidade para cada um dos participantes consiste exatamente em haver muitos outros participantes no Facebook; mas lendo tudo vejo que a ideia é sobretudo combater a concentração vertical (a mesma empresa possuir muitos negócios), não tanto a concentração horizontal (uma empresa dominar um dado negócio).

E também sobre isso, um artigo que li há dias em The American Conservative, The Death of the Internet, por Jonathan Tepper:

Although the architecture of the internet is still decentralized, the ecosystem of the World Wide Web is not. A few giant companies have near-monopolistic control of traffic, personal data, commerce, and the flow of information.

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

[Isto não deve ser muito frequente - linkar uma proposta da Elisabeth Warren e um artigo de The American Conservative no mesmo post]