House Committee Hears of Big Tech’s Alleged Anticompetitive Behavior in New Hearing

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2021 – A House committee on Thursday heard of the need for strengthened antitrust measures to stem the influence of big technology companies, which are alleged to have increased its stranglehold on data on the internet.

The committee heard of Google’s and Facebook’s overwhelming control of the digital ad market; Amazon’s alleged anticompetitive practice of demanding small businesses that sell on its platform provide its proprietary information so it can make its own products; and Apple using its position as one of two app store platforms to extract taxes from competitors like Spotify and other news apps.

This is the first in a series of hearings held by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to consider legislative proposals to address the rise and abuse of market power online and to modernize the antitrust laws.

On Thursday, the committee played host to antitrust experts and affected businesses for the hearing titled “Reviving Competition,” which was intended to address market power and big tech’s role as gatekeeper online.

The committee also heard about recent actions by the tech giants to silence speech online. Since early October 2020, according to the testimony, Google’s YouTube platform has been deleting numerous conservative channels; Facebook and Twitter have been shutting down pages, including former President Donald Trump’s; and Amazon kicked the controversial social media app Parler off its web hosting service.

Google and Apple blocked the app from their app stores.

Witnesses recommended the government strengthen enforcement agencies so they have more teeth and reform how merger cases are viewed.

Antitrust gatekeepers work to promote competition between powerful and smaller digital companies, and innovative connectivity competitors should be able to compete at the same level with big tech, said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge.

That would involve creating a level playing field where larger players cannot leverage their own platform to one-up competitors, said Hal Singer, managing director of Econ One.

Sharing those concerns, Eric Gunderson, chief executive officer of Mapbox, said that American competitiveness and innovation are at risk with these giants controlling the sector. Antitrust reform needs to be focused on allowing other companies to be able to compete in a level playing field.