Require Tech Platforms Share Data, Which a Breakup May Not Achieve, Says Wheeler
Rather than breaking up big digital platform companies as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposes (see 1903280045), requiring they share information might be more effective at resolving problems, wrote former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday. He nonetheless said the 2020 presidential…
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candidate's plan deserved attention. "Physical breakup of dominant companies," he wrote for the Brookings Institution, "may not be the only path to competition in a world where the tools of dominance are virtual rather than physical." Splitting them into "smaller clones may reduce their size, but each new company will still possess the virtual assets that enabled their parents’ anticompetitive activities in the first place: the databases full of information about you and I," wrote Wheeler, a visiting fellow. "Break open that hoard of digital information, make it available to innovators and competitors," he advised. "Requiring competitive interconnection to databases would have the effect of an 'internal break up' by going after the source of its market control." AT&T, Comcast, Facebook and Google are donors to Brookings and didn't influence this blog, the post said. Warren's office referred us to her campaign, which didn't comment. The Internet Association declined to comment.