Tag: monopoly

Nearly everyone uses Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and nearly everyone can see how smaller businesses have been hurt by their dominance. Nearly everyone has an opinion about whether they are too powerful, whether they know too much, whether they ought to be admired or feared. There are stark differences between, say, Senator Bernie Sanders’s calls to “break them up” (usually a reference to banks), and former Vice President Joe Biden’s “cooperative” approach. Mr. Biden (still undeclared), has taken the position that big corporations should not be “singled out” and that their chief executives can be persuaded to shoulder their responsibilities toward workers and communities. (In the late 1970s, Mr. Biden resisted efforts to strengthen the antitrust laws, though his views may have changed as the law has grown weaker.) The largest question mark among the major candidates is Senator Kamala Harris of California, who represents the state where the largest tech monopolies are headquartered. She was tough in her questioning of Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, during congressional hearings last year, but she has been silent on the questions raised by tech monopolies. The variety of antitrust positions in the emerging Democratic field means that it will no longer be enough for a candidate to mutter a few platitudes about big corporations and let the party’s technocrats decide what the nation’s approach to monopoly power ought to be. Such questions of economic policy affect us all and therefore should sit at the core of a majoritarian democratic process. Indeed, they once did: Today’s interest in excessive corporate power recalls a time — 1912, to be exact — when antitrust policy was the central economic issue in the presidential race.

A case before the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that Apple's app store holds an illegal monopoly over other groups seeking to provide the same service. NBC's Pete Williams reports. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination…