Mark Zuckerberg expects a lawsuit if Elizabeth Warren is elected president. He says that would ‘suck.’
"I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren isn’t the only one readying for a fight.Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he expects to face a legal battle if the Massachusetts senator is elected president.
In leaked audio from a recent company meeting published Tuesday by The Verge, Zuckerberg was asked by a Facebook employee if he was worried about the company being broken up by the federal government, in the wake of a recent $5 billion fine and the rise of politicians like Warren. In a plan released earlier this year, the Bay State Democrat outlined how she would try to break up the technology giants through both legislation and anti-trust lawsuits, due to concerns about the effects of their concentrated power.
Zuckerberg doesn’t think Warren is bluffing, but also expressed confidence that Facebook would ultimately win in the courts.
“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he said.
“And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,” Zuckerberg continued. “I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that there was anger and concern about the effects of concentration in the tech industry, but said “that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues.” He argued unwinding the so-called “Big Tech” giants would actually diminish their ability to address problems, like hate speech or foreign attempts to influence the country’s elections (The Verge has published the full transcript of Zuckerberg’s comments here).
“I understand that if we don’t help address those issues and help put in place a regulatory framework where people feel like there’s real accountability, and the government can govern our sector, then yeah, people are just going to keep on getting angrier and angrier,” he said. “And they’re going to demand more extreme measures, and, eventually, people just say, ‘Screw it, take a hammer to the whole thing.’ And that’s when the rule of law comes in, and I’m very grateful that we have it.”
Warren doesn’t think her position is so extreme.
On the campaign trail, the senator has often noted that the United States government used to take more aggressive action to break up industry consolidation, before anti-trust policy shifted in the 1980s.
In her plan to break up “Big Tech,” Warren argued that the government’s softening approach toward anti-trust enforcement has allowed companies like Facebook to increase their size and use their influence to both “snuff out” competitors and lobby the political system for more favorable regulation. The result has been less innovation in the tech sector and, ultimately, lesser quality products for consumers, according to Warren.
“What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy,” she wrote in a tweet Tuesday responding to Zuckerberg’s comments.
With a link to her plan, Warren doubled down on the call she made six months ago: “It’s time to #BreakUpBigTech.”
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1179023354348654595?s=20
