Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

by Wendy Liu

For products and services where meaningful competition is important, the lever of intellectual property reform offers an alternative to antitrust efforts to break up tech companies, which would have limited success in restoring competition due to intellectual property hoarding and high start-up costs in the sector. Rather than breaking up companies horizontally by undoing acquisitions — as has been proposed by US Senator Elizabeth Warren18 — their power could be challenged vertically, through removing their control over intellectual property. This would essentially tackle their power from the bottom up. Once a product gets enough traction, it should be unbundled into a series of open protocols and standards to permit alternative implementations, analogous to the way web browsers are developed today (though without the corresponding corporate dominance19). There should also be high portability of personal data, as well as publicly-released code and other data so that competitors can be built without duplication of work.