Michael R. Strain, Columnist

The Worst Idea (So Far) in Democrats’ War on Big Tech

A House chairman thinks Facebook and Google should get the Glass-Steagall treatment. What is he thinking?

March 11, 2019 at 1:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

It’s 2019, not 1933.
Photographer: Bloomberg

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Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Amazon, Facebook and Google got all the attention last week. But she isn’t the only Democrat looking to rein in big technology companies. Take the idea floated earlier by the chairman of the House antitrust subcommittee, Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island. He wonders “whether there would be a way to think about separating what platforms do versus people who are selling products and information — a Glass-Steagall.”

Cicilline thinks that separating out “functions,” as the Glass-Steagall Act did in financial services until its repeal in 1999, could help curb the market power of tech companies like Google and Facebook and increase market competition.