Elizabeth Warren wants the government to crack down on technology giants

Monopolies at the ISP level where literally no competition exists is a major problem. Near permanent copyright monopolies granting extraordinary power for a century or more is a major problem. Patent trolls are a huge problem.

Privacy and fairness are major problems. Buggy OS upgrades, popular search engines, and built in music programs are not.

"Apple uses control over the iPhone platform to advantage Apple Music over other subscription music services.

Amazon uses control over the world’s largest store for e-books to advantage books published by Amazon over books from rival publishers.

Google uses control over the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own Google-generated content even when a straight implementation of Google’s algorithm would surface content by someone else."

As other commenters have pointed out, the better role for government is in eliminating the monopoly rights they have already granted to ISPs. If she actually understood and cared about monopolies, she'd be attacking all of those deals signed by clueless and/or corrupt local politicians. Instead, she just wants to rail against the faceless enemy of "big business", in order to drum up. She's a Trump of a different suit, just another populist looking to derive power by exploiting simplistic ideas that don't work in the real world.

These firms and their well paid employees generate a lot of income tax and capital gains tax revenue for California.

I suppose California lawmakers ought to stridently resist such regulations. It threatens their money source.

How do you recognize a person out of their depth when they discuss tech? When they have little experience in tech.

If she's not smart enough to know that tech trends last as long as produce at the grocery, many of us would not want her making or influencing decisions about tech.

Having consulted (software development, training programmer teams to write code) at once-strong firms like Sun, Silicon Graphics, Global Village, and others, it's pretty shocking how fast a tech giant can disappear.

Palm; Borland; Amiga; Napster; Friendster; GeoCities; InfoSpace; Gateway; Netscape; and others. Dying slow deaths: HP; Yahoo; Zynga; etc.

Warren knows nothing about how the tech economy eats its own. No need to take actions like she proposes.

The primary benefit of a giant company is efficiency. They are able to provide their goods and services at a lower cost to the rest of the economy because of their scale. The downside is that any level of corruption/cheating within the company will become magnified by an order of magnitude, again because of their scale. And the thing is, the majority of companies are anti-competitive or otherwise have some tendency to "cheat" the market. That's human nature mixing with the incentives of the economy. Usually that's fine in the sense that we tolerate it as fellow, flawed humans. But when the company is giant that foul play becomes a big problem, and we see all the pain that tends to accompany giant corporations like those pointed out in the article.

So, is the increased market efficiency worth it? Doesn't the anti-competitiveness cancel out any benefit that that efficiency may have had? Or worse, perhaps the anti-competitiveness out-weighs the improve efficiency, and giants are actually hurting the overall efficiency of the market?

That would be my devil's advocate argument. If giant corporations tend toward anti-competitiveness by their nature, and if that anti-competitiveness is out-weighing any benefit from increased efficiency, then it makes economic sense to "ban" giant corporations altogether.

Another, perhaps playful, way to look at it is as an optimization problem. We can view market efficiency as the loss function, which we wish to maximize. Our current economy roughly applies Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to this problem. Try a couple things at once, measure average loss, and then propagate that loss to the entities within the market roughly proportional to their contribution to the loss. In other words, companies that helped make the market more efficient are rewarded. Companies that did the opposite are punished. Those companies adjust one direction or the other, and we iterate again. The problem with naive SGD like this is that it _overfits_. Any data scientist will tell you that. Overfitting the economy results in a very optimal loss in the short-term (training set), but terrible loss (market efficiency) in the long-term (testing set). And that's exactly what we see. Giant corporations like Walmart give us really low prices, but in the long run they are a strain on local and global economies and stamp out competition that would have helped find a more optimal, global efficiency.

Digressing, this is of course idealistic. Making large companies outright illegal would be insane in the current political environment, would not be practical, and ultimately won't solve the issue. A more nuanced approach is appropriated, and perhaps that's exactly what Warren is attempting here. To that end, and if the above argument holds water, I'd have to say I agree with her approach and wish her luck. A little L2 regularization will go a long way to making out economy more robust.