Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says it is time for the federal government to use antitrust laws to break up major tech giants like Apple. Speaking during an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the lawmaker argued that massive tech corporations are acting outside the bounds of standard corporate behavior while raising prices on consumers who are already struggling to get by.
“The problem that we have is these big problems, they think they are governments. They want to be governments,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They want to have totally unchecked power, and I believe that we need to pursue antitrust.”
The call for antitrust enforcement comes closely on the heels of major pricing changes at Apple. The company recently increased the cost of several signature products, including Macbooks and iPads, with some price tags jumping by as much as $500.
Apple executives have defended the pricing shift as a necessity of the current tech landscape. CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that the hikes were “unavoidable.” According to the company, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers has caused an extraordinary surge in global demand for memory and storage, driving up manufacturing costs.
However, Ocasio-Cortez rejected the idea that consumers should bear the financial burden of tech infrastructure growth.
“Now your ability to buy laptops, computers, iPads, electronics in general is going to go up, because data centers are sucking up all of our own industrial supply,” she said. “In a lot of ways, we are subsidizing the development of a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers.”
The New York representative also took aim at the broader artificial intelligence industry, targeting executives for their internal corporate goals regarding automation and employment. While she did not name any specific AI firms, she criticized the industry’s approach to human labor.
“They are sitting in their private investor calls and they are so giddy about all the people they are going to put out of work,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
To curb the influence of these industries, Ocasio-Cortez argued that breaking up corporate monopolies must be paired with new regulatory frameworks. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big. And we also need to be instituting consumer protections,” she said.
Wall Street responded quickly to Apple’s pricing announcements last week. The company’s stock took an immediate hit, sliding from roughly $301 at the start of the week down to $283.78 per share by the close of the market on Friday. Despite the hit to its share price, Apple maintains a market capitalization of $4.17 trillion, securing its position as the second most valuable company in the world.
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