Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Big Tech And Big Everything Else Too

By Sara Morrison, Recode

Sen. Elizabeth Warren loves talking about antitrust. In fact, she says, she can’t think of anything more fun to talk about.

Antitrust is not a topic most people associate with “fun,” but the Massachusetts Democrat’s passion for it is entirely believable. It’s not just the excitement and earnestness with which she talks about competition laws and how to change them; it’s also the fact that she has been talking about it for years. Longer, in fact, than many of the politicians who talk about it now.

She’s also why many of them are talking about it now. Warren took antitrust reform and anti-monopoly power out of relatively small academic and advocacy circles and thrust it into the national conversation. Then she ran for president and brought the phrase “break up Big Tech” — and the concept — into the mainstream. Now there’s an administration and a Congress in place that might actually do some of the things she’s been pushing for. And Warren is still talking, because she still has a lot of work to do.

“Getting everybody lined up to push back against a powerful, well-financed industry is tough,” Warren told Recode. “But the fact that it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s okay not to do the work. It just means shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done.”

She’s referring to a package of bipartisan, Big Tech-targeted antitrust bills. Some of those would change things a lot; they could, indeed, break up Big Tech. Those bills are also going nowhere in Congress. The bills that are much more likely to pass — but whose progress has been slow — give a few massive companies new rules about how they can run their digital platforms and services.