Big Tech’s Big Show
All eyes will be on this week’s high-profile antitrust hearing. The MadHATTERs Editorial, 29 July 2020
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Wednesday: big day for Big Tech as their head honchos face the US House Judiciary Committee. The much-anticipated antitrust hearing is the first time that four of them — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — will be testifying in one hearing. A quick recap of why they’re there: Amazon for its handling of third-party sellers, Apple for its App Store policies, Facebook for its WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions, and Google for its hold over the digital ad market. But other issues including misinformation and content moderation will probably get some airtime too. Here’s what each of them’s expected to tell Congress as they try to convince lawmakers that big is still beautiful.
But the working-together-to-fight-COVID-19 honeymoon is over. The current pandemic has only increased our reliance on Big Tech, further strengthening their dominance. And these tech companies continue to use their unparalleled access to data to consolidate their power. Two cases in point will come up at the hearing: whether Amazon used data from individual third-party sellers (£), as well as its investments in startups, to develop competing products. And if Google’s been doing something similar with ‘sensitive’ data collected from Android phones on how people are using rival apps.
Wednesday’s event will be the most high-profile antitrust hearing since Bill Gates’ 1998 appearance before Congress to testify on Microsoft’s uncompetitive practices. And we all know what happened next: a landmark lawsuit, the end of Microsoft’s computing monopoly, and Gates shifting his world dominance ambitions to philanthropy.
We’ll be tuning in (watch the livestream here) to see if this week’s Congressional hearings will be similarly pivotal for today’s internet economy.
MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com
