Can Washington Stop Big Tech Companies? Don’t Bet on It
“Individuals, lawmakers, we’re all feeling a rapid loss of control
and power around these companies,” said Barry Lynn, the director of the Open Markets Institute, a liberal think tank that opposes concentrated corporate power.
“We’ve all become a bit cyborg,” writes Franklin Foer, the former editor of New Republic,
in “World Without Mind,” one of several new books examining the giants.
Because Amazon manages to keep lowering prices, the antitrust authorities have overlooked other harms caused by Amazon’s growth, she said, including the way it has created platforms for shipping and cloud storage
that give it deep hooks into much of the rest of the economy.
In previous eras of suffocating corporate dominance over our lives — when industrialists gained an economic stranglehold through railroads
and vast oil and steel concerns, or when rampant financial speculation sent the nation into economic paroxysms — Americans turned to their government for a fix.
In June, Open Markets was forced from its previous home, the New America Foundation, reportedly
because of pressure from Google, a huge New America funder.
For nearly two decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents, most tech giants have been
spared from much legislation, regulation and indeed much government scrutiny of any kind.