US senators to question tech titans on ‘tremendous’ power
TECH giants will be grilled by senators today as they defend themselves from claims they have used their market dominance to unfairly crush competitors in Europe and the USA.
Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook will testify before the Senate justice committee, which is conducting a “top-to-bottom” investigation into Silicon Valley’s “tremendous concentration of market power”.
In a separate hearing, Facebook’s head of cryptocurrency will answer questions from the Senate banking committee about Libra, the company’s new digital payment system that has raised concerns on Capitol Hill.
It is the latest example of mounting bipartisan hostility in an industry that could once do no wrong in American politics, and comes amid renewed attention from regulators that have historically treated it kindly.
Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly approved a $5bn (£4bn) settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, while the FTC and US Justice Department are said to be considering competition inquiries of all four companies.
“We cannot allow giant companies to assert their power over critical public infrastructure,” said Sherrod Brown, the most senior Democrat on the Senate banking committee.
“The largest tech companies do not act in the interest of working Americans, but in the interest of themselves and their investors.”
Democrats who once praised Silicon Valley as a creator of skilled jobs have turned on it since the 2016 election, attacking its record on privacy, the role of its algorithms in public life and, increasingly, its sheer size.
Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made a plan to break up tech giants a key part of her campaign, arguing that Google, Amazon and Apple should not be allowed to run online marketplaces while simultaneously selling their own products through them. But Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, echoed her when he said: “By almost any measure the giant tech companies are larger and more powerful than Standard Oil was when it was broken up. They’re larger and more powerful than AT&T when it was broken up.”
President Donald Trump has accused big tech of Left-wing bias, last week holding a “social media summit” that gathered his most prominent online supporters for what was regarded as early election rally.
David Marcus, who leads Facebook’s Libra project, pledged in written testimony that Libra will not compete with sovereign currencies and will not be launched until it had been approved by regulators.
He also warned that if America failed to create a global digital currency it would be eclipsed by “others whose values are dramatically different” – a coded reference to Chinese companies such as Wechat, which has a built-in payments system.