Titans to answer for practices
FOUR BIG-TECH chief executives, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple, were set to answer for their companies’ practices before the US Congress as a House panel caps its year-long investigation of market dominance in the industry.
The four command corporations with gold-plated brands, millions or even billions of customers, and a combined value greater than the entire German economy. One of them is the world’s richest individual (Bezos), another is the fourth-ranked billionaire (Zuckerberg).
The four were set to testify remotely for a hearing yesterday by the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. In its bipartisan investigation, the panel collected testimony from midlevel executives of the four firms, competitors and legal experts, and pored over more than a million internal documents from the companies.
A key question is whether existing competition policies and century-old antitrust laws are adequate for
EPA overseeing the tech giants, or if new legislation and enforcement funding is needed.
Subcommittee chairperson Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, has called the four companies monopolies, although he says breaking them up should be a last resort.
The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have been investigating the four companies’ practices.
Each company has a distinct profile and sets its widening footprint in specific markets, and each tech titan has his own approach and story to tell. For Bezos, who presides over an e-commerce empire and ventures in cloud computing, personal “smart” tech and beyond, it will be his first appearance before Congress.
Bezos is introducing himself, in a way, in his hearing testimony, unusual for the occasion. He lays out his challenging life story growing up in New Mexico as the son of a single mother in high school, and later with an adoptive father who emigrated from Cuba at 16. Previewing his written testimony in a blog post on Tuesday, Bezos traces his origins as a “garage inventor” who came up with the concept of an online bookstore in 1994.
He claims Amazon accounts for less than 4% of retail in the US, Bezos maintains. He affirms his rebuff to critics who call for the company to be broken up: Walmart is more than twice Amazon’s size, he says.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death and protests against racial injustice, Facebook’s handling of hate speech has recently drawn more fire than issues of competition and privacy, especially after Facebook’s refusal to take action on inflammatory Trump posts.
Zuckerberg has said the company aims to allow as much free expression as possible unless it causes imminent risk of specific harms or damage. “I understand that people have concerns about the size and perceived power that tech companies have,” Zuckerberg’s statement says. “Ultimately, I believe companies shouldn’t be making so many judgements about important issues like harmful content, privacy and election integrity on their own. That’s why I’ve called for a more active role for governments and regulators, and updated rules for the internet.”
Attorneys-general from both parties in 50 states and territories, led by Texas, launched an antitrust investigation of Google in September, focused on its online advertising business. “Google operates in highly competitive and dynamic global markets, in which prices are free or falling, and products are constantly improving,” Pichai says in his written testimony.
Apple, whose iPhone is the third-largest seller in the world, faces EU investigations over the fees charged by its App Store and technical limitations that allegedly shut out competitors to Apple Pay.
“Apple does not have a dominant market share in any market where we do business,” Cook says. He is making the case that the fees Apple charges apps to sell services and other goods are reasonable.