Four American Tech Giants at Capitol Hill

Executives from Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple attended the hearing of the US House of Representatives Antitrust Subcommittee.

Regarding the question of monopoly, Matt Perault, head of global policy development at Facebook, said that the advertising sector is highly competitive, with only a quarter of advertising spending flowing to Facebook. Amazon's associate general counsel Nate Sutton also said that Amazon only accounts for 1% of global retail sales and 4% of retail sales in the United States.

When asked about “what is the world’s most active social media network platform company,” Matt Perault, head of global policy development at Facebook, said “I don’t know.” When Adam Cohen, Google’s director of economic policy, was asked about an article about fake listings on Google Maps, he also said he didn’t know. When Apple’s chief compliance officer, Kyle Andeer, was asked why he continued to market his cloud storage products, he said he was not aware of the details.

When the committee questioned Amazon’s use of other sellers’ data on its platform to market its new products, Amazon’s executive Sutton gave a rather vague answer, “Amazon only aims to help sellers on the platform succeed, and no matter which seller, algorithm will automatically optimize the customers’ needs. This data is only used to predict customers’ needs and ultimately provide products to consumers.”

Although the technology giants were questioned in turn, Reuters pointed out that the anti-trust subcommittee actually didn’t have the power to punish these companies. Although the revision of the current anti-trust law will further restrict the technology companies, it still has to go through the “checks” of the Senate. Therefore, the main purpose of the questions is to express the discontent of the expert group on the practices of the technology giants.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal commented that although the Antitrust Subcommittee chair David Cicilline raised the most feared prospects of technology giants--splitting these companies or fundamentally limiting their business modes, this threat has not yet appeared, and even if it does, it will not last long.

August 15, 2019

Source: www.chinanews.com

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