Amazon, Apple, Facebook, & Google’s Antitrust Hearing
On July 29, 2020 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, & Google’s Sundar Pichai met before the House Antitrust committee.
On July 29, 2020, Four of the World’s biggest tech giants met in front of a House Judiciary Committee to respond to antitrust concerns. Each of these companies faced a unique accusation: Google for how is scapes competitors content for its services; Amazon for how it stamps out the competition by gathering seller information and launching & promoting competing products; Apple for its control, gatekeeping, and fees of running the App Store; and Facebook for its practice of buying out competitors. All we’re variations on a theme that these companies have gotten so powerful in their influence and scale that they hurt and restrict competition in the marketplace.
What I’ve done is compile the sources I’ve been accessing to understand the situation better. I hope that they can be useful to others trying in coming to an understanding of the situation these tech companies, and the future of regulating them, are in.
As I digest more sources, I’ll be sure to return back and update this page.
Videos
The Full 6.5 Hour Hearing:
YouTube: CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple face Congress in antitrust hearing
“Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook appear before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.”
YouTube: Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon hearing: what you need to know - The Verge (July 29, 2020)
“CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testified before Congress in the tech antitrust hearing. Lawmakers squared off with the chief executives of the tech industry’s four most powerful players. Even though each company is under antitrust scrutiny for different reasons, the committee used this week’s hearing to point out similarities between all four, making the case for future regulatory reform.”
Podcasts
Daring Fireball: The Talk Show: ‘Algorithms, How Do They Work?’, with Nilay Patel (July 31, 2020)
“Nilay Patel returns to the show to discuss this week’s House antitrust hearing featuring testimony from Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg.”
The Vergecast: Tech antitrust hearing: the important moments and what comes next (July 31, 2020)
“Nilay, Makena, Adi, and Casey discuss the important moments from Congress' antitrust hearing with Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai.”
The Daily: The Big Tech Hearing - July 30, 2020
“The C.E.O.s of America’s most influential technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook — were brought before Congress to answer a question: Are they too powerful?
Today, we talk to our colleague who was in the room about what happened.”
Dithering: Big Tech in Congress (July 31, 2020)
Accidental Tech Podcast: One Branch Leads to Yes (July 30, 2020)
Dithering: Aggrieved Apple (July 29, 2020)
Dithering: An Antitrust Preview (July 27, 2020)
The Vergecast: Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson and Rep. David Cicilline on Apple’s monopolistic app store fees (June 18, 2020)
“Apple is acting like a monopolist and a bully, according to the chairman of the House Antitrust Committee.”
Articles
The Atlantic: The Tech Companies Already Won (July 30, 2020)
“Antitrust could break up the big players. It wouldn’t change everyday life.”
The Washington Post: Tech Titans Gave Their House Testimony Virtually, but It Was the Congressmen Who Departed From Reality (July 29, 2020)
The Washington Post: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google grilled on Capitol Hill over their market power (July 29, 2020)
