Big Tech tells Congress it doesn’t stifle competition
WASHINGTON — Leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google fended off accusations Wednesday that their companies stifle competition, under intense questioning from lawmakers investigating Big Tech’s market dominance.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, in his first appearance before Congress, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices even as they provided data highlighting how competitive their markets are and the value of their innovation and essential services to consumers.
Among the toughest questions for Google and Amazon involved accusations that they used their dominant platforms to scoop up data about competitors in a way that gave them an unfair advantage.
Bezos said that he couldn’t guarantee that Amazon had not accessed seller data to make competing products, an allegation that the company and its executives have previously denied.
Regulators in the U.S. and Europe have scrutinized Amazon’s relationship with the businesses that sell on its site and whether the online shopping giant has been using data from the sellers to create its own private-label products.
“We have a policy against using seller specific data to aid our private label business,” Bezos said in a response to a question from U.S Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat. “But I can’t guarantee to you that that policy hasn’t been violated.”
Pichai struggled as the antitrust panel’s Democratic chairman, Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, accused the company of leveraging its dominant search engine to steal ideas and information from other websites and manipulating its results to drive people to its own digital services to boost its profits.
Facebook, in turn, faced renewed focus on its gobbling up of competitors. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the Democrat who heads the House Judiciary Committee, told Zuckerberg that documents obtained from the company “tell a very disturbing story” of Facebook’s acquisition of the Instagram messaging service. He said the documents show Zuckerberg called Instagram a threat that could “meaningfully hurt” Facebook.
Zuckerberg responded that Facebook viewed Instagram as both a competitor and a “complement” to Facebook’s services, but also acknowledged that it competed with Facebook on photo-sharing.