Exclusive — Sen. Josh Hawley: Break Up Big Tech Monopolies to Protect Free Market

Big Tech companies need to be broken up to end monopoly control and protect free markets, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), author of The Tyranny of Big Tech, said on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Hawley declared, “We need to break these companies up. It’s actually pretty simple. These are monopoly companies that have monopoly power over speech, over news, over journalism, over information. Of course, we’re now too familiar with how they’re trying to project that power into our government and politics, and to try to control our country. We’ve got to break them up.”

“We’ve got to change our laws,” he added. “In order to do that effectively, we need a new trust-busting agenda for the 21st century. It’s time for conservatives and populists to get out there and to say that nothing less than a break up will do.”

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Using antitrust legislation to break up the world’s largest technology companies is aligned with a conservative philosophical and economic viewpoints, Hawley held, describing the technological landscape of information flow as overly centralized. The status quo, he assessed, is anathema to a free and competitive market.

“It’s been the traditional Republican view that what we must never interfere with the free market,” he said. “My contention is the free market here doesn’t exist any longer in the tech space. These companies — as monopoly companies — are stifling competition. They are preventing new entrants to the market. They are raising those barriers to entry, and now they’re behaving just like you’d expect a monopoly would. They’re taking from us our personal data, our personal information, [and] they’re doing it without our consent.”

Hawley continued, “Can we sue them? No. Can we hold them accountable? Not really, not currently, because we don’t have any options. My view is, we need to cut the monopolies down to size. We need to disperse their monopoly power so a free market can operate, [and] so we can have competition.”

“Monopoly and liberty don’t go together,” he added. “Competition is the friend of liberty and that’s what we need more of.”

Hawley described his proposal as an antitrust measure.

“We have these anti-monopoly laws on the books in order to protect the free market,” he stated. “Monopoly is not the friend of the free market. Monopoly is the opposite, the enemy of the free market. In order to protect the free market — in order to protect capitalism and allow it to function and to flourish — you have to break up monopoly concentrations of power.

He concluded, “We’ve known that in this country for over a century. We’ve done it repeatedly, and now we need to do it again.”