Sen. Amy Klobuchar talks tech monopolies at University of Louisville's McConnell Center

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who gained national attention when she sought the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, visited the University of Louisville Monday to discuss her efforts to pump the brakes on monopolies during a lecture hosted by the McConnell Center.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who founded the McConnell Center over 30 years ago along with university officials — introduced Klobuchar at his alma mater, calling her "one of my favorite senators."

"She is extremely effective in the Senate," he said. "Able to build relationships on both sides of the aisle, which is really important if you want to accomplish anything."

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Indeed, during Monday's lecture Klobuchar promoted bipartisan, tech-centric antitrust legislation she's cosponsoring with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

If companies like Apple, Google and Facebook are going to have massive market shares, she said her and Grassley's bill — dubbed the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — would (among other things) prevent them from automatically giving preference to their own products in online marketplaces they control.

Klobuchar suggested the nation and Congress should spend more time working on issues that are "important but not urgent," meaning matters of significance that don't necessarily have to be dealt with right away.

She counts climate change and immigration reform in this category, as well as a main focus of her speech at U of L: the growing power of monopolies.

"Some of these things that have been hanging around for a really, really long time without us acting because it's really easy to ignore," Klobuchar said. "And you know, every single year when we hear it's a 'storm of a century' caused by climate change, Mother Nature says, 'Hold my beer.' And then we see it again.

"Just pretending these things aren't happening because you can get through day to day, or into the next election, I just think is a big mistake when we all know we have to make some long-term changes," she said. "And we can differ on what those changes are or how quickly we want to implement them, but we have to move."

Klobuchar, who wrote a book called "Antitrust," traced anti-monopoly sentiments back to the very beginning of U.S. history.

European colonists first came to America because they wanted religious, political and economic freedom, she said. The Boston Tea Party wasn't just about them pushing back against taxation without representation, but also about their disinterest in buying tea from a monopoly, the British East India Co.

After America's founding, Klobuchar said it took Congress around a century to finally pass major anti-monopoly legislation, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

Fast-forwarding to today, she said things have gone downhill in recent years, with mergers on the rise and significant consolidation happening across various industries.

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The goal of antitrust initiatives isn't to "radically destroy companies," she said. "What we are looking at is putting some rules of the road in place when it comes to competition policy."

A key priority, she said, is to ensure the U.S. Department of Justice has enough resources to pursue antitrust cases.

She referenced a quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said in an eventually publicized internal email that it's better to buy than compete.

"OK, that is the antithesis of what we stand for in America when it comes to capitalism and competition," she said. "Well, I thought disruption in tech is supposed to be good, right? It's supposed to be good that you have new competitors and you have disruption and you have people coming in and willing to shake things up and offer new bells and whistles on their products.

"... And I don't challenge the success of these companies. I wear a Fitbit, I'm not a Neanderthal, right?" Klobuchar continued. "But that doesn't mean that you just sit there and say, 'OK, you guys, Google, you can now have 90% market share (on search engines)."

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Later, as she wrapped her speech, she again spoke of the need to tackle long-festering issues like the unbridled growth of tech monopolies.

"It's really easy to get in that little, short-term rabbit foxhole," she said. "But try to think bigger about some of these bigger problems. And the solution can't just be: 'We'll do nothing.'

"There are just a lot of ways you can get things done," she said. "But my hope for our Congress and for our leadership is that we take on these big challenges of our time. And I can't think of a better place to have those discussions start than in a school like this one."

The McConnell Center gives U of L scholarships to students around Kentucky, hosts a public speaker series and houses the archives of McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, the former U.S. transportation secretary.

Morgan Watkins is The Courier Journal's chief political reporter. Contact her at mwatkins@courierjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter: @morganwatkins26.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Mitch McConnell welcomes Amy Klobuchar to University of Louisville