House panel grills tech chiefs over monopoly concerns
Antitrust subcommittee questions CEOs of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook on practices
WASHINGTON — Several titans of Big Tech appeared virtually before members of Congress on Wednesday, as the House antitrust subcommittee continued its investigation of concentration across the digital realm.
The chief executives of four of the most prominent technology firms in the world — Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook — were prepared for questions about their business practices and market dominance. Though their companies represent new-age innovations, including search engines, smartphones and social media, the criticisms they face bring to mind those lodged by “trustbusters” against late 19thcentury industrial barons.
Since last June, the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust issues has been investigating “the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement,” as a joint statement from committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., put it. The panel is one of several fronts on which the tech industry is battling against the prospect of government regulations.
As the hearing was about to get underway, President Donald Trump expressed some conservatives’ separate complaint that the large social media firms are biased against them in censoring users on the political right, which the companies deny. He told reporters as he left for a fundraising trip to Texas, “We’re going to be watching the hearings today very closely, because there is no question that what the big tech companies are doing is very bad.” Once on Air Force One, he repeated his displeasure in a tweet.
Critics of the technology giants also welcomed the scrutiny in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. The hearing “comes on the heels of a yearlong investigation that is looking deeply into the
market power and the business models and the conduct of these four corporations,” said Sarah Miller, co-chair of the advocacy group Freedom From Facebook & Google. “And that is something that has not really been done in decades.”
The subcommittee members could go beyond the topic of antitrust regulation and digital monopolies. The four companies are implicated in a host of other issues — including labor practices, domestic surveillance and online censorship — some of which have become increasingly contentious in an election year that has had both parties taking shots at Big Tech.
When Zuckerberg testified
before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in 2018, for instance, the discussion touched not only on data privacy — the focus of the hearing — but also on disinformation, political bias and even the basics of Facebook’s business model.
The scope of the House hearing could easily expand because the four CEOs lead radically different companies. With all four being questioned at once — and remotely given the pandemic — some have worried that the committee members won’t be able to question the witnesses as aggressively or in as much depth as they otherwise might.
All four companies face complaints of monopolistic behavior, though the practices in dispute vary greatly.