“ORour founders would not bow to a king, we should not bow to the emperors of the online economy. “This is how Congressman David Cicilline began the remarkable hearing on Wednesday in the Antitrust Subcommittee, where four tech CEOs: Apple’s Tim Cook Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon finally had to answer questions about how businesses were operated. And the answers they gave were not pretty. The word both Republicans and Democrats used to describe their corporations was Mastery, and as members revealed the evidence they had gathered in an investigation over the past year, it’s easy to see why.
Almost any time during the four-hour hearing offered a striking illustration of the extent of misbehavior of these corporations. Take Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos often seemed lopsided and ignorant of his corporation’s own practices. Congresswoman Lucy McBath played the audio of an Amazon vendor tearfully describing how her business and livelihoods were arbitrarily destroyed by Amazon by restricting sales of her product, for no reason the vendor could discern. Bezos acted surprised, as he usually did. Representative Jamie Raskin presented an email from an Amazon executive saying about an acquisition that “we are buying market position, not technology.” Bezos later admitted that Amazon buys companies simply because of their ‘market position’, proving that many of the hundreds of acquisitions these tech companies have made are likely illegal.
Mark Zuckerberg had to confront his own emails in which he noted that Facebook’s purchase of Instagram was made to buy a competitor. His reply was that he did not remember, but he imagines that he was probably joking when he wrote that. A congresswoman on Joe Biden’s vice presidential candidate list, Val Demings, asked Zuckerberg why he restricted Facebook tools for competitors like Pinterest, but not for non-competitors like Netflix. There was no reply. Congressman Cicilline asked about Facebook promoting the incendiary speech and making money from the advertising sold alongside that speech. Zuckerberg zeroed in on free speech points, and Cicilline interrupted him: “This is not a speech problem, it is about your business model.”
Mastering great technology has serious consequences. The United States has lost thousands of media outlets due to the concentration of advertising revenue in the hands of Google and Facebook; Two-thirds of American counties now have no daily newspaper. The nation lost 100,000 independent businesses between 2000 and 2015, a 40% drop, many due to Amazon’s exploitation of legal advantages from sales tax evasion to its apparent violation of antitrust laws on price rivals. low. Hundreds of thousands of merchants now depend on Amazon’s platform to sell products, and Amazon has consistently increased rates. Just a few years ago, these third-party merchants paid 19% of their revenue to Amazon, now it’s up to 30%, which is, by coincidence, the amount Apple demands from hundreds of thousands of app makers who have to reach out to iPhone users. It is no secret why small business formation has collapsed since the last financial crisis; These giant platforms tax innovation.
And then there is fear. I have reported on small and medium-sized businesses scared to present stories of how goliaths abuse them for forgery or unfair fees. As one told me about his relationship with Amazon, “I am a hostage.”
Fortunately, the voices of retaliation-fearing small businessmen came through their elected leaders. “I pay 20% of my income to Uncle Sam in taxes, and 30% to Apple,” a member of Congress said he heard from businessmen. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colorado, spoke about one of the few brave entrepreneurs who openly testified months ago, the founder of PopSockets, who had been forced to pay $ 2 million to Amazon only to have Amazon stop allowing counterfeiting. your items sold on the platform. Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong went into detail about using Google tracking to harm her competitors in advertising, along with Democrat Pramila Jayapal, who asked the Google CEO why the corporation was still directing traffic to its own network of properties instead of sending traffic to the best available. Outcome.
Time and again, CEOs had similar responses. I do not know. I will come back to you. I am not aware of that. Or long diversion attempts, followed by members of Congress who interrupted them to get answers to clear questions. I learned two things from the surprisingly pale responses of these powerful men. First, they hadn’t had to deal with being asked real answers about their business behavior for years, if at all, so they weren’t ready to respond. And two, the antitrust agents of the past 15 years, dating back to the Bush and Obama administrations, are largely to blame for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of these corporations. The emails and information that Congress unearthed were available to these law enforcement officers, who nevertheless approved merger after merger, and refused to file complaints against anti-competitive behavior.
It’s rare to see Congress cover itself with glory, but believe it or not, that’s what happened. While some Republicans, such as high-ranking member Jim Jordan, passed the audience yelling about the alleged persecution of conservatives on social media, most of the subcommittee focused on genuine business issues. Even most Republicans focused on anti-conservative bias acknowledged that the ability to restrict conservative voices originated from market power.
As David Cicilline said: “These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be divided, all need to be properly regulated and accountable. “And then he quoted Louis Brandeis, who said:” We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both of them”.
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