US: Bill Gates defends Big Tech, says firms shouldn’t be broken up

Bill Gates doesn’t think it’s a good idea to break up the biggest US tech companies, reported Bloomberg. 

The Microsoft co-founder and former chief executive officer battled the Justice Department for years in the late 1990s in a bruising antitrust case.

At issue was the software giant’s bundling of its Internet Explorer browser with Windows as a way to maintain its dominance in PC operating systems. Ultimately, Microsoft remained intact.

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is one of the few big US technology companies not under regulatory scrutiny in Washington. The Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, and a congressional committee are all scrutinizing Big Tech companies from Alphabet’s Google to Facebook and Amazon, that Washington has concluded have gotten too big and too powerful.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, has made a forceful and detailed plan about how she would go about breaking them up.

Gates however said, “You have to really think; is that the best thing?” in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “If there’s a way the company’s behaving that you want to get rid of, then, you should just say, ‘OK, that’s a banned behavior.’ But splitting the company in two, and having two people doing the bad thing — that doesn’t seem like a solution.”

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