Elizabeth Warren Says Google, Apple and Amazon ‘Snuff Out Competition’

Elizabeth Warren attacked some of the country’s biggest companies on Wednesday when she said that Apple, Google, and Amazon “snuff out competition.”

The Democratic Senator from Massachusetts said that the tech giants make it harder for smaller companies to compete in the tech industry.

“Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of other companies depend on for survival,” Warren said during a speech that was part of New America’s Open Markets Program. “But Google, Apple, and Amazon also, in many cases, compete with those same small companies, so that the platform can become a tool to snuff out competition.”

Warren went on to compare the tech companies to the banks that caused the financial crisis.

“[The] idea of ‘too big to fail‘ in the financial sector gets a lot of attention,” Warren said. “But the problem isn’t unique to the financial sector. It’s hiding in plain sight all across the American economy.”

Warren pointed to several examples where the companies abused their power, mentioning a 2012 FTC inquiry investigating Google for exploiting its search dominance to damage smaller companies.

She said Apple Music has made it hard for other streaming services like Spotify to compete and that Amazon has mistreated authors by trying to “steer consumers to books published by Amazon to the detriment of other publishers.”

The senator also noted that the companies deserve to be highly profitable and deliver valuable products, but “the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again.”

[Fortune]