To date, Warren has offered the most aggressive proposal to reshape technology markets. Under her plan, which she unveiled in a March blog post on Medium, Warren would appoint regulators who would unwind mergers she believes are anticompetitive. In addition, companies with global annual revenue of $25 billion or more would be prohibited from both owning platforms, which she would regulate as public utilities, and offering products and services on them.
Among the deals that Warren has said would be on her chopping block: Amazon’s purchase of the upscale Whole Foods grocery store and Zappos, the digital shoe and clothing retailer. She would also look to undo Facebook’s acquisition of the WhatsApp messaging service and the Instagram photo app. And she would try to undo acquisitions by Google of the driving app Waze, connected-home company Nest, and ad service DoubleClick, which helped make Google an online advertising juggernaut.
U.S. antitrust enforcers approved those deals without objection. Their counterparts in Europe have taken a different approach and cited anticompetitive conduct by the U.S. tech giants in numerous enforcement cases, including that Google’s internet search results unfairly favored its own shopping service over those of its competitors.
Warren’s plan to unwind previous deals could face steep challenges, given federal court rulings. Many observers note that it would be easier for authorities to increase scrutiny of future deals than to carve up existing companies, in part because enforcers have a high legal bar to prove dominant companies are thwarting competition.
To split off Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook, for instance, authorities would have to find evidence that those acquisitions harmed consumers by squelching competition from an emerging rival. That challenge could become tougher as Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg moves to integrate Facebook more tightly with those companies -- potentially making it harder to disentangle them.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.