There ought to be some sort of regulation preventing this sort of thing - like the Glass-Steagall Act in banking that mandated separation of investment banking and commercial banking operations.
GS was created so an implosion on the banking side didn’t kill our savings accounts.
In general antitrust is more about preventing Coke from buying Pepsi than Coke buying It’s bottlers or Kroger. The idea was vertical integration isn’t as harmful on consumer prices as horizontal.
I think in this case it’s more about something like GDPR.
My analogy was based on means, not ends. GS split investment banking ops from consumer banking. Similarly something could separate the consumer data business from the telco/infrastructure business.
But sure, GDPR works just as well; even better perhaps. Although GOOD LUCK getting something like that to pass through US legislature. Especially when the legislative has already allowed ISPs to freely trade in consumer traffic (meta)data. You can find a preliminary coverage here https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp-regul...
But indeed, I do agree that a GDPR-clone is overdue in the US. While I hope it comes to fruition, I also hope it isn’t hopelessly bastardized and rendered toothless by the lobbyist lot.
