In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt acquired the sobriquet "trust buster" after relying on the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the Northern Securities Company monopoly dominating railroad routes from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren intends to bring to the White House some of this hard-line stance against today's monopolies should she be elected president next year.
Her specific targets: Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
Sen. Warren wrote in a Medium blogpost on Friday:
"Today's big tech companies have too much powertoo much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else."
Warren gained most of her reputation in Congress as an anti-trust crusader, forming the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) out of Dodd-Frank to stop big banks' ability to again wreak havoc on our economy.
As president, she vows to choose regulators seeking to break up "anti-competitive mergers," like Facebook's recent purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods and Zappos, and Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and Waze, explaining:
"We must help America's content creatorsfrom local newspapers and national magazines to comedians and musicianskeep more of the value their content generates, rather than seeing it scooped up by companies like Google and Facebook."
In so doing, she is looking out for the small-business owners, those who can't compete against the tech companies' budgets and influence.
She adds:
"I believe in markets that work. Markets that have a cop on the beat and have real rules and everybody follows them."
On Friday, at a rally in Long Island City, Queens, New York--the location of a scuttled second Amazon headquarters--Warren declared:
"I'm sick of freeloading billionaires."
On Sunday morning's Face the Nation, Sen. Warren elaborated:
"The giant tech companies right now are eating up little, tiny business startupsand competing unfairly.
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