Amazon is simultaneously the marketplace, the seller, and the logistics company. Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and the advertising infrastructure that runs beneath all of them. Google dominates search, maps, email, cloud computing, and the ad tech stack that funds the entire internet. These are not competitive markets — they are monopolies, and they are growing more concentrated every year.
The consequences are real: small businesses squeezed out of their own markets by Amazon's ability to copy their products and bury them in search results; local news outlets decimated as Google and Facebook capture the ad revenue that once sustained journalism; democracy threatened by the concentration of political speech inside a handful of platforms that operate without public accountability.
AOC has explicitly supported breaking up Amazon's marketplace and logistics operations, and breaking apart Facebook's social, messaging, and advertising functions. She backed FTC Chair Lina Khan's aggressive antitrust enforcement agenda — precisely because Khan argued that the old antitrust framework, focused narrowly on consumer prices, was inadequate for the digital economy. Big Tech does not always raise prices. It destroys competition, and then it shapes the conditions of everyone else's existence.
Real antitrust enforcement means structural separation — breaking these companies apart so they cannot simultaneously operate platforms and compete on them. It means interoperability requirements so people can leave Facebook without losing their social graph. And it means updating our antitrust laws for an era when the most dangerous monopolies deal not in steel and oil, but in data and attention.