L.M. Schulte
2 min readJun 20, 2017

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I definitely don’t want to crack down on all tech companies. I really just want to make sure that the more powerful among them (The list would include fewer than ten tech companies at present, and I would gladly expand the list to cover non-tech companies if they attained power equal to that of Apple. For instance, Exxon-Mobile, large banks, or pharmaceutical companies might be included.) are reigned in. For example, Amazon engages in anti-competitive practices in a number of fields. Alphabet may not be as powerful now as it will be someday, but all it needs to do is make a small percentage of its ventures successful in order to become involved in a huge swath of people’s lives. And I’d argue that even now, Alphabet has enormous power since some Alphabet product is part of the life of almost every internet-connected person. Admittedly, Alphabet hasn’t done anything too terrible thus far except infringe on people’s privacy (which is bad enough, really), but if leadership changes, formerly well behaved companies can easily become bad actors, and while I’m certainly no expert, current law doesn’t seem to cover the patterns of bad behavior that companies like Amazon engage in, nor does it seem strong enough to prevent companies like Uber from engaging in particular types of bad behavior (like testing driverless cars without a permit, misclassifying workers, etc.). A few changes in rules (e.g. making fines for egregiously and willfully bad behavior dependent on the wealth of the company rather than flat rates for companies that can afford to laugh off million dollar judgements, preventing companies from becoming involved in more than x sectors of the economy, etc.) would go a long way toward preventing bad behavior or diminishing economic impacts if trouble arises in a single company that has become very important to the U.S. or global economy at large.

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