In hearing with tech giants, Sensenbrenner defends antitrust laws
Outgoing U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner argued on Wednesday that the country’s antitrust laws do not need to be changed during a high-profile congressional hearing with tech company executives.
Sensenbrenner, ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, spoke during a hearing on the panel’s ongoing antitrust investigation surrounding large tech companies.
The CEOs of tech giants that critics say should be broken up into smaller companies — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook — testified remotely at the hearing.
During his second set of questions at the hearing, Sensenbrenner said that based on the yearlong investigation he concluded there was no reason to change antitrust laws.
“They have been working just fine,” Sensenbrenner said. “The question here is the question of enforcement of those antitrust laws.”
After asking Bezos and Pichai what would happen if their companies were broken up —with both executives responding that it would be unhelpful to consumers —Sensenbrenner said he thinks that “regulators” and “enforcers,” not Congress, should be looking at the companies and the concerns.
“It seems to me that it’s not for Congress, that legislates, to toss all of our antitrust laws and the precedent that has been established through litigation over the last hundred-plus years, but it’s something where we ought to go back to the regulators (such as the Federal Communications Commission), to the enforcers, and have them look at this stuff, and have them make a determination on whether or not the law’s been violated.
Zuckerberg disagreed with a representative’s statement that Facebook was a monopoly.
“We face a lot of competitors in every part of what we do,” he said.
The tech company executives faced a grilling from both Republicans and Democrats.
In addition to examining how the companies approached competitors, many of the questions fell along party lines, often focusing primarily on a couple of themes: poor treatment of thirdparty sellers on Amazon from Democrats and silencing of conservative voices on Google and Facebook from Republicans.