The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel could release its report on antitrust allegations against four of the country’s largest tech juggernauts by next week.
The committee has been investigating Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google to see whether their business practices hurt smaller rivals. The results of the probe may arrive as soon as Monday, according to Reuters, and will come after a Friday hearing on proposals to strengthen antitrust laws and restore online competition.
The CEOs of the companies, including world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, appeared at a hearing before the committee in July and testified that they all face competition in their respective fields.
“Every day, Amazon competes against large, established players like Target, Costco, Kroger and, of course, Walmart — a company more than twice Amazon’s size,” Bezos said.
Mark Zuckerberg similarly painted Facebook — a sprawling social-media empire with some 2.5 billion active users — as an “American success story,” scrapping for a piece of the pie with the other companies represented.
“[The] most popular messaging service in the US is [Apple’s] iMessage,” he said. “The most popular app for video is [Google’s] YouTube. The fastest-growing ads platform is Amazon, the largest ads platform is Google. And for every dollar spent on advertising in the US, less than 10 cents is spent with us.”
The four tech juggernauts have a combined market value of about $5 trillion.
The Department of Justice is also probing the big four tech platforms. Facebook and Amazon are also facing inquiries by the Federal Trade Commission, while US states attorneys general are looking at Facebook and Google.
With Post wires