Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google grilled on Capitol Hill over their market power.
The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google took a brutal political lashing Wednesday as Democrats and Republicans confronted the executives for wielding their market power to crush competitors and amass data, customers and sky-high profits.
The rare interrogation played out over the course of a nearly six-hour hearing, with lawmakers on the House’s top antitrust subcommittee coming armed with millions of documents, hundreds of hours of interviews and in some cases the once-private messages of Silicon Valley’s elite chiefs. They said it showed some in the tech sector had become too big and powerful, threatening rivals, consumers and, in some cases, even democracy itself.
“Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.).
Cicilline, the chairman of the antitrust panel, opened a congressional investigation of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google last year, aiming to explore whether the tech industry’s most influential quartet of companies had attained their status through potentially anti-competitive means. In response, the four chief executives — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai — took the witness stand to fiercely defend their businesses Wednesday as rags-to-riches success stories, made possible only through American ingenuity and the sustained support of their ever-growing customer bases.
But lawmakers repeatedly presented a different vision at their hearing, one in which Silicon Valley’s myriad advancements in commerce, consumer electronics, communication and a vast array of online services had come at an immense cost to the people who use those tools and the companies that seek to compete against the tech giants.
In exchanges likely to have lasting resonance, Democrats repeatedly confronted Facebook’s Zuckerberg with his own past emails. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top lawmaker on the House Judiciary Committee, brought up a 2012 message in which Zuckerberg apparently said he sought to acquire Instagram, which at the time was a rival photo-sharing app, out of fear that it could “meaningfully hurt us.” Later, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) pointed to other Facebook communications that described the company’s acquisition strategy generally as “a land grab.”
“Mergers and acquisitions that buy off potential competitive threats violate the antitrust laws,” Nadler charged. “In your own words, you purchased Instagram to neutralize a competitive threat.”
“We compete hard. We compete fairly. We try to be the best,” Zuckerberg said earlier in the hearing.
Amazon, meanwhile, faced withering scrutiny over allegations it may have misled the committee. The e-commerce giant previously told lawmakers it does not tap data from third-party sellers to boost sales of its own products. But Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) brought up public reports that indicated to the contrary, prompting Bezos — delivering his first-ever testimony to Congress — to offer a striking admission of potential fault.
“What I can tell you is we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee you that policy has never been violated.”
For all four executives, the afternoon offered an abundance of additional uncomfortable clashes, laying bare the broad, bipartisan frustrations with the way Silicon Valley puts users’ privacy at risk, polices content online and hurts competitors, including small businesses that have told lawmakers they cannot hope to compete with these tech giants. On several occasions, lawmakers cut off or talked over the tech executives when they offered vague or long answers, seeking to hold them to account for the evidence investigators had gathered from their probe.
PopSockets, Tile and other companies will ask Congress to help stop Big Tech bullying
Republicans, meanwhile, largely used their time during the hearing to attack some tech companies for engaging in perceived political censorship against conservatives, a charge that the industry vehemently denies.
“We all think the free market is great. We think competition is great. We love the fact that these are American companies,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. “But what’s not great is censoring people, censoring conservators and trying to impact elections. And if it doesn’t end, there has to be consequences.”
To read the full article click the link below.
Source: washingtonpost.com
Website:
https://wapo.st/2DFWgRC
Date: July 29, 2020