A lot of Google employees think that Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ calls for breaking up big tech companies like Google and Facebook would be better for the company. The employees have been donating a lot of money to the respective 2020 presidential candidates. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been pretty vocal on why Big Tech should be broken up and strangely enough rank high up in terms of donations made by Google employees.
Google employees mostly engineers and programmers talked to Recode said that breaking up Google could help the tech ecosystem by allowing for more competition which in turn leads to more and better tech innovations for consumers. Google’s executives are not on board with this idea. Some employees even said that regulation would take the company back to its bootstrapping days when Google was an upcoming startup.
More and more tech employees have in recent months call for more ethical behaviour and policies from their companies and these presidential candidates share the same sentiments. There’s also growing scrutiny from Washington as the Justice Department launched major antitrust reviews of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Elizabeth Warren who in March wrote a Medium post on how to break up Big Tech has so far gotten a total of $87,000. Another presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg comes second close with $73,300 who has also been critical of tech companies. Bernie Sanders has also gotten $58,000. Trump has so far gotten a total of $5600 for his reelection campaign.
Most Google employees think that that antitrust action won’t affect them that much and that it might not only be in line with their ethos in the long term but also better for the tech ecosystem and the society.
Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Google. She's also getting more donations from Google employees than any other Democrat, and Sanders, who is also in favor of break-up, is second.
Turns out a lot of Google employees think a break-up would be just fine: https://t.co/vlDOWdoV22 pic.twitter.com/IelmKUq1X9
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 30, 2019
“I’m just not a big believer it’s going to hurt us if they break it up. It will not reduce the value of the company,” a Google engineer told Recode and continued by saying, “When Larry and Sergey formed Alphabet, part of the thinking is that the companies would be smaller and more agile. Breaking Google up further would further their plan.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily expect Google to make a whole lot more money as a result of these changes, but it wouldn’t take a huge hit in profits. It’s a small price to pay for having a better world,” another Google employee added, “Increased prosperity might even lead to more paying customers. We’re always thinking about the next billion users at Google.”
Nicholas Lunceford, a Google engineer said,” I think it’s a good idea to investigate monopolistic companies across all sectors, and I’m willing to look at whatever is proposed”
“I have some concerns about the implementation of such a potential breakup, as it’s not a trivial challenge, but I trust [Warren] to choose a team of knowledgeable and competent people to think hard about how it can be done,” another engineer added.
