It was a distant echo, but now it’s becoming a drumbeat. The big tech companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon — are increasingly the subject of talk about government regulation. And one month ago, Congress held its first hearing about what antitrust enforcement might look like regarding the tech giants. 

One of the people who testified that day was Sally Hubbard, of the Open Markets Institute, which bills itself as an organization dedicated to fighting “the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country.”

I wanted to talk more with Sally about the topic. There’s a lot of ground that we try to cover, but in essence, I tried in this conversation to sketch out what the case for more aggressive anti-trust enforcement is, what the case for stricture regulation is, and what the intended outcomes would be of these proposals. 

Here’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Medium post on breaking up big tech. 

Hubbard wrote in January about the antitrust argument against Facebook and Google. There is a more in-depth argument for this here.

Here’s Hubbard’s written testimony to Congress.

Here’s the congressional testimony from David Pitofsky of NewCorp.

Matt Stoller of Open Markets wrote recently about Facebooks proposal to create its own currency. 

Here’s the New York Times piece on Google sharing location data with law enforcement. 

The New Yorker just published a piece on YouTube. 

From the right, a counterargument against breaking up Facebook. 

And finally, a piece on “surveillance capitalism” and how Silicon Valley lobbyists are trying to water down the move toward regulation.

Outro Music: "Lyla" by Big Red Machine

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