The Update Desk: Amazon's 'Monopoly'

In a Sunday School post last month, I shared Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's idea that tech companies need to be broken up. Warren's conversation with Ed O'Keefe on Face the Nation started with him asking her why she thought that needed to be done.

Because the giant tech companies right now area eating up little, tiny businesses, startups - and competing unfairly. 

In Warren's mind, platform companies should not be competing with platform users, putting their own products ahead of the competition in search returns, and so on.

So what I'm saying is we've got to break these guys apart. You want to run a platform? That's fine, You don't get to run a whole bunch of the businesses as well. You want to run a business? That's fine. You don't get to run the platform. Think of it this way, it's like in baseball. You can be the umpire or you can own one of the teams, but you don't get to be the umpire and own the teams.

So Facebook would have to sell off Instagram, Amazon would have to sell off Whole Foods, and "all those little businesses that they're running, competing businesses. Yup."

Warren says this can happen under our anti-trust rules that are already in place.

But is this a solution in need of a problem?  Let's take a look.