Hawley on Big Tech Breakup: ‘Good for Protecting the Freedom of the People’

Tuesday on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Company,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) continued his push to break up big tech companies to put an end to monopolies.

Hawley argued breaking up companies like Amazon and Google would “be good for competition” in addition to “protecting the freedom of the people.”

“I think Congress ought to adopt new legislation, and I’ve proposed some to do just this, to break up these companies by putting new rules in place about what industries they can own,” Hawley emphasized. “Take Amazon — why should Amazon be able to own the dominant e-commerce platform in the world and also own a sizable chunk of the cloud with AWS and also have their own product lines that they sell on their Amazon platform gleaned from their competitors? They shouldn’t be able to do those things. They shouldn’t be able to consolidate multiple industries under one heading, under one holding company. Google does the exact same thing — Alphabet, Google, they have Google Cloud, they have got their search platform, of course, they also own the ad market, the digital ad market where they have a mere monopoly share there, too.”

He continued, “We shouldn’t allow them to own all of these different sectors and segments. We ought to make them spend those off. This would be good for competition. You know, I’m an old-fashioned free-market guy. I believe in competition, and I believe that competition is not only good for innovation, but it is good for liberty. It’s good for protecting the freedom of the people, and that is what we need to be about.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

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