Momentum grows to break up big tech, as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple face scrutiny

Last month, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid into CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a nearly 6,000-word New York Times op-ed that sounded the alarm on the social network’s alleged monopoly.”Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” wrote Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007 and sold all his Facebook stock in 2012. “It is time to break up Facebook.”Hughes is far from alone in re-evaluating the tech world. Just five years ago, millions of consumers looked at tech as a benefit, and US regulators took a mostly hands-off approach to the fast-growing industry. Now both groups are far more suspicious of these giant corporations and much more interested in what they do with your data. This sudden turnaround was brought on especially by Facebook’s lax privacy practices, which resulted in Russia interfering with the 2016 US presidential election, as well the data company Cambridge Analytica gobbling up millions of Facebook users’ information and exploiting it for targeted political ads.Now the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing competition in the tech industry, including past mergers and potentially anticompetitive practices. State attorneys general are gearing up to investigate big tech, too. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate, is calling for a breakup of Apple, Amazon,… Read full this story

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