AUSTIN, Texas �� Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said Saturday that breaking up giant tech companies would "keep the marketplace competitive."
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts spoke Saturday at the South by Southwest cultural festival in Austin, a day after proposing to break up companies like Facebook and Google if she's elected.
On Friday she called for legislation that would designate large technology companies as "platform utilities," and for the appointment of regulators who'd unwind technology mergers that undermine competition and harm innovation and small businesses.
"The idea behind this is for the people in this room," for tech entrepreneurs who want to try out "that new idea," Warren said. "We want to keep that marketplace competitive and not let a giant who has an incredible competitive advantage snuff that out."
Warren said venture capital "in this area" has dropped by about 20 percent because of a perceived uneven playing field. She didn't provide more detail or say where she obtained her figures.
Warren outlined her plan in a Medium post Friday, saying the very success of companies like Amazon and Google "highlights why the government must break up monopolies and promote competitive markets."
Referring to previous eras of U.S. monopoly breakups, Warren said that what's new is old: when someone gets excessive market dominance, they start to destroy the market competition.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who announced her 2020 candidacy last month, spoke in Austin earlier Saturday. The Minnesota lawmaker is the top Democrat on the Senate's antitrust panel. She stopped short of endorsing a breakup of large technology companies.
'Cool' Antitrust
Asked if the likes of Google, Facebook or Amazon.com should be split, Klobuchar said she would first want an investigation. While promising to make antitrust "cool again," she suggested a more measured approach.
"We are going to be able to have a better discussion of this framed in a way around things like pharma pricing and data privacy, which is going to make it more bite sized and doable for an election," Klobuchar said.
SXSW, as the festival is known, is the biggest gathering so far for the Democrats �� and a few Republicans �� running in 2020 or otherwise part of the political scene.
The conference has grown into one of the country's defining cultural events, combining music and film festivals with showcases for technology and politics. This year, it's an ideal venue for presidential aspirants to test their message with one of their core audiences: millennials and post-millennials.
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(Victoria Graham contributed to this report.)
