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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 31 2020, @11:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the medium-rare dept.

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).


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @04:47PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 31 2020, @04:47PM (#1029352)

    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.

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