Antitrust Investigations Into Big Tech Beginning To Bear Fruit
Legislative efforts to bust up Big Tech monopolies have scored bipartisan support in a divisive political climate that rarely sees cooperation from both sides of the aisle.
A trove of formerly classified internal documents released as part of a congressional investigation into Big Tech could help lawmakers rein in the power of massive companies including Amazon, Facebook, and Google, reports suggest.
The heavily-redacted internal documents, including emails and confidential company reports, were released this week as part of a bipartisan House Judiciary Committee investigation into Big Tech companies’ alleged illegal anti-competitive activities.
The Committee formally published its 450-page “Investigation of Competition in the Digital Marketplace” report Tuesday, after a 16-month investigation headed by the Antitrust Subcommittee, according to a June 19 press release put out by Democratic U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, chairman of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative law.
Politico noted the newly released documents could add “ammunition to the push for Congress to toughen antitrust laws,” and “bolster the committee’s claims that the internet giants illegally favor their own products.”
The Tuesday press release stated the recently released documents include “internal Facebook documents showing the company views itself as dominant in the social networking market and insulated from competitive threats.”
Similarly, formerly classified communications obtained from Google appear to show the company “leverages its control over the Android mobile operating system to prevent smartphone manufacturers from introducing products or services that compete with Google’s family of mobile apps,” the press release stated.
Internal Amazon documents, meanwhile, allegedly “demonstrate how Amazon’s abuses its dominance over e-commerce to coerce third-party sellers to purchase other services from Amazon, such as fulfillment and distribution.”
Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels pushed back against the committee’s report in a statement to Politico, arguing the documents had been “cherry-picked,” and that the report “relies on outdated documents and inaccurate allegations from our commercial rivals.”
While it’s unclear whether the House Committee will be successful in pursuing antitrust litigation against the Big Tech companies (Politico noted that “pending legislation to update antitrust laws would make” lawsuits “more difficult”) the trust-busting push has bipartisan support in a divisive political climate that rarely sees cooperation from both sides of the aisle.
Many Republicans, largely interested in cutting back Big Tech’s power to censor the voices of conservatives, have also advanced efforts to break up corporate monopolies via antitrust litigation.
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