Big Day for Big Tech: CEOs Testify in House Antitrust Hearing

By: Ann O’Brien & Joshua Jowdy (Antitrust Advocate)

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust conducted its sixth hearing into online platforms and market power, welcoming as witnesses the chief executive officers of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. The hearing lasted more than five hours and was styled as “Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.” Due to COVID-19, the CEOs testified virtually, adding an ironic digital twist with the tech titans appearing together in video tiles on a screen with no big-tobacco moment standing side-by-side to take their oath.

The Subcommittee’s hearing culminated its year-long investigation into Big Tech, and the questioning was informed by requests for information posed to each tech company last September, which generated millions of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of interviews. Subcommittee Chair Cicilline opened the hearing by describing each of the tech companies as a “bottleneck for a key channel of distribution,” whether that be a channel of retail distribution, distribution of software applications, or distribution of information. Chair Cicilline began and ended the hearing by expressing concerns about the dominance of each firm and abuse of their purported monopoly power…

CONTINUE READING…