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The US senator heavily linked with becoming Hillary Clinton’s presidential running mate has hit out at three technology giants over trying to “lock out” competition in the industry.
Elizabeth Warren took aim at Apple, Amazon and Google in a speech in Washington over their activities, suggesting each had worked to ensure smaller companies could not compete with them.
Of Apple, Warren said that the iPhone maker “has placed conditions on its rivals that make it difficult for them to offer competitive streaming services” to Apple Music.
She added that Google uses “its dominant search engine to harm rivals of its Google+ user review feature”, while Amazon “uses its position as the dominant bookseller to steer consumers to books published by Amazon to the detriment of other publishers”.
All strong words from a politician who recently backed Mrs Clinton to much fanfare in the US and is now considered a strong contender to be her vice-presidential candidate for the US election in November.
“Google, Apple and Amazon have created disruptive technologies that changed the world, and … they deserve to be highly profitable and successful,” she added.
“But the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again.”
It wasn’t only the tech sector that Warren took aim at though, also taking swipes at Wal-mart and US telecoms giant Comcast.
None of the tech firms mentioned have since commented on Warren’s remarks, but Spotify did choose to speak out. The music streaming service’s head of communications and public policy Jonathan Prince told Recode: “Apple has long used its control of iOS to squash competition in music, driving up the prices of its competitors, inappropriately forbidding us from telling our customers about lower prices, and giving itself unfair advantages across its platform through everything from the lock screen to Siri.
“You know there’s something wrong when Apple makes more off a Spotify subscription than it does off an Apple Music subscription and doesn’t share any of that with the music industry. They want to have their cake and eat everyone else’s too.”
The senator for Massachusetts has history when it comes to the technology sector – having criticised Uber (among others) earlier this year over not fully sharing the wealth that its innovations had produced.
