AOC wants to ‘break up’ tech giants after Apple hikes prices
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Congress should pursue antitrust legislation to “break up” large technology companies after Apple significantly raised prices on its products.
The progressive lawmaker spoke on the dangers of Big Tech during a Fox News interview that aired Sunday.
“The problem that we have is these big companies — 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.”
“We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big,” she added, “and we also need to be instituting consumer protections for people.”
Last week, Apple began hiking its prices by about 20% because it said it needed to counter the rising costs of memory and storage chips. MacBooks and iPads are among the affected products, while iPhones and AirPods are exempt.
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company’s move in an interview with the Wall Street Journal this month.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
The surge in pricing comes as tech giants pursue the rapid development of data centers, powered by artificial intelligence. Apple blamed the up-and-coming tech infrastructure for the spike in chip demand.
“The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” the company said. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
Ocasio-Cortez recently introduced legislation that prohibits the construction of new data centers and the expansion of existing ones until Congress passes “strong national safeguards.” Her bill follows a similar one led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who introduced his proposal in March.
Together, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders hope to enact a moratorium on data centers to protect consumers from rising electricity prices and environmental harms.
“A moratorium will give us time — time to understand the risks, time to protect working families, time to defend our democracy, and time to ensure that this technology works for all of us, not just the few,” the senator previously said.
Like his progressive peer, Sanders criticized Apple for hiking its prices and took issue with Cook’s justification for the move.
“Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is ‘unavoidable’ after it made $112 billion in profits last year & spent $310 billion on stock buybacks,” he posted on X, though a community note corrected him on the stock buybacks figure; it was $89.3 billion, per a Securities and Exchange Commission document. “These price hikes aren’t unavoidable. They’re unacceptable.”