Last week Elizabeth Warren attacked technology companies, including Apple, Google, and Amazon for monopolistic behavior. I am not sure why she left Microsoft out given that they have had a greater impact in destroying competition than anyone else, but these attacks shows she has limited understanding of industries that actually add value, rather than industries like finance and law that on facilitate value. It also shows the limitation of the single issue politician that define the far left and right. The issues that have lead to these large companies are not technology based, nor are they necessarily reminiscent of the robber barons of the rail road era. Instead they come from changes in the law over the past 30 years.
By focusing on technology companies and not the changes in laws, we lose the opportunity to push the progressive values that have allowed current innovation to flourish. These innovation focus on collaboration and universal ownership rather that individual effort and strict copyrights and patents. Your phone, web browser, even some of your office applications, are all based on open source software, the GPL, and other innovations that have come to define much of the technology companies. This is where efforts of progressives need to be focused.
To head off the fundamentalist attacks let me make two things clear. First, this is in no way meant to impugn the work of Warren. The financial industry has caused great damage to the country, and as an industry that does not add value, must be regulated as there is great incentive to remove value through arbitrage rather than provide the critical capital market that defined a developed country.
Second, I am in no way defending any of these companies. Like all firms they do some good things and some bad things. Apple is complicit in manufacturing practices that harm workers. Amazon has destroyed the local retail market. Google is the greatest threat against privacy and the only credible precursor to Skynet. But if we take the simplistic view of Warren and not analyze fundamental market and regulatory conditions as root causes, there is no way we can fix the situation. Dismantling Alphabet is not going to stop the motivation to trade personal private information for free stuff.
What I am doing here is saying that these companies are pushing a progressive agenda, purposefully or not, by building an infrastructure that is more open and based more on open tools rather than an infrastructure based on copyrights, patents, and litigation. By attacking these companies, Warren is promoting a conservative agenda where innovation is severely limited by perceived right holders. Otherwise all we are left with is Disney.