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Big Tech CEOs grilled by Congress: Key moments from the historic antitrust meeting:
For five hours on Wednesday, the four Big Tech CEOs of the world's most powerful companies faced a grilling from US lawmakers in Washington, in an unprecedented hearing over alleged anti-competitive practices at their companies.
The hearing was the first time that Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google's parent Alphabet appeared together before Congress.
The Big Tech CEOs, appearing via video link, all faced moments in the spotlight from the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, with Pichai and Zuckerberg receiving the most attention. It was sixth and final hearing into competition in the digital market by the committee, and a culmination of more than 1.3 million documents and hundreds of hours of interviews and testimonies.
There are long-standing concerns that the four companies, worth a combined $4.85tn, have become too dominant for rivals to compete on the same level.
Antitrust regulators fear that a lack of competition will lead to higher prices for consumers. However, when digital platforms offer services for free – as Facebook and Google do – it is difficult for lawmakers to prove that consumers are worse off.
Another charge is that a lack of competition stifles innovation, which in theory could lead to subpar products and services for consumers. But given the four tech giants are known for being at the cutting edge of innovation, this is again difficult to prove.
As such, Congress is considering new antitrust laws that are appropriate for the digital age, which could prevent so much power being concentrated in so few companies.
Here are some of the key topics the Big Tech CEOs were grilled on.
Here's a couple YouTube streams of the hearing from Reuters (6½h) & C-SPAN3 (5½hr).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @01:49PM (4 children)
I work in a large for my industry company (now) - used to work in startups, got bought - it's not a bad thing for me, personally.
We just acquired a small startup. They make devices that can significantly reduce complications of a particular surgical procedure, affecting tens of thousands of people a year. They had a sales force of 1, who also happened to be the company president, and chief engineer. They contracted out the software, and had a staff of 3 building the devices. They were making approximately 6 devices a month.
Since we acquired them, we've assigned a part time staff of 20 R&D engineers to oversee the incorporation of the product into the larger company systems, ensure regulatory clearance around the world, and initially ramp up the production staff from 3 to 9, later transferring production to our facility which employs hundreds. Our specialty sales staff of dozens of field reps around the world expect to be selling 50 of these devices a month by this time next year.
No, the larger company doesn't innovate per-se. What the larger company does is identify these good ideas and implement them on the world stage, getting the idea into the marketplace where it can actually start helping people instead of being analyzed in academic journals endlessly. In essence, we work the distribution channel. The owners of the companies that get bought don't usually complain, our typical purchase price for a good idea runs around $50M-100M.
We're not angels, we're not perfect, but those "innovative startups" are basically playing with themselves until they hook up with serious money to get them launched into the broad world markets.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Entropy on Friday July 31 2020, @02:08PM (1 child)
Of course the case we're actually talking about is where big-G purchases a startup, then files their intellectual property in the mountain of intellectual property they own. They don't actually use it, they just hold it there in case they can tax someone who wants to innovate...forever.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @03:59PM
We're not angels. If you want to identify the devil in the room, call it capitalism.
I have watched ideas that work, could have been saving lives for the past 20 years with basically trivial per-patient cost, be shelved because the reality of my industry is that it takes a lot of money to get anything properly launched and supported in the broad market and that money gets apportioned to the "best" ideas, meaning the ones that will return maximal ROI. So, for the past 20 years a virtual cure for bulimia has been ignored. Another for meconium aspiration with similarly dramatic (like 95+%) improvement in outcome, and potential application for things like alveolar collapse associated with COVID, similarly shelved.
The Devil is a little less than 80% evil, the angels of capitalism do sometimes direct resources where they do the most good for the most people - those shelved ideas aren't "taking up oxygen" from other ideas that ostensibly do more good for more people. Sucks when you're one of the people that would benefit from a shelved technology, but if your pet technology were taken out and developed the thinking goes that it would be taking away more benefit from other things than it provides itself.
In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a couple of times every 100 years from an out of control pandemic, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as something more mundane but pervasive, like clean drinking water. Yes, we can do both, but reality is: we can't actually do all the things. Ideas are easy, development is work, marketing is risky.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 31 2020, @04:02PM (1 child)
From your description, it's apparent that you don't work for one of the huge international megacorporations. Yeah, you're international, but you're obviously not a trillion dollar mega.
There really is a "sweet spot" in corporate size and corporate power, where you must compete, and you must strive for efficiency, and you are at least partly doing things in the public interest. At least, you haven't forgotten that the public interest is where your income comes from.
I don't know exactly what corporation/company first became much too large, and much too powerful for humanity's good. The East India company, maybe? But, I'm sure we can agree that those corps that buy up the startups, just to smother everything in red tape and litigation really should be broken up.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @04:47PM
We're ~100B market cap, IMO too big for the good of the world, but this is the way it is.
I formerly worked for a rare-in-my-industry "mid sized" company with a ~1B market cap, IMO that's still too small - too easy for them to play cowboy and slip under the regulatory radar, get away with things they shouldn't. Not all small companies play renegade cowboy games, but when they're in that ~1B size class, the money that leads them seems particularly tempted to color outside the lines just to keep the gravy train rolling at top speed.
I also worked for a number of "minimal" startups in the ~0-10M market cap range, they can be made into going concerns, but organic growth at that size class is excruciatingly slow and most opt for buyout or growth by investment. If you want to really foster innovation, the (tilted in every way imaginable already) landscape needs a tilt adjustment in favor of these small companies to enable them to grow organically. Unfortunately, it's much easier for the larger companies to get organized enough to lobby the legislatures for their own benefit, the little guys barely have the bandwidth to keep themselves solvent, much less tilt at windmills that would benefit them AND their competition if they scored a win.
🌻🌻 [google.com]