Two years later, many legislators beg to differ. The House Judiciary Committee’s tech antitrust investigation culminated in a July 29 hearing at which the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook were all put on the hot seat. Seattle Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat, interrogated Jeff Bezos, pushing him into an awkward corner about Amazon’s use of third-party seller data to create its own brand products. At the 2018 Facebook hearing, legislators had stumbled, revealing basic ignorance about the workings of the platform; this time, they came prepared.
The recommendations in the staff report, endorsed by the committee’s Democratic majority, are sweeping. Some, like increasing data portability between platforms, better funding the agencies that are supposed to enforce antitrust laws and setting a higher bar for mergers, are likely to have bipartisan support. Others, like prohibiting large tech companies from competing on their own platforms or from leveraging dominance in one sphere to undercut competitors in another — as Amazon uses Amazon Web Services to subsidize its retail and logistics business — will be more contentious. The only way to guarantee these results may be “structural separation,” or breaking a company into pieces. In other words, old-fashioned trustbusting.
Whatever the outcome of this November’s presidential election, these issues will be live and urgent next year. It’s easy to agree that Big Tech has too much power. But the question of what exactly to do about it is a complex one, wrapped up with conceptual — and ideological — assumptions about markets, competition, efficiency and innovation, and inseparable from larger questions of what kind of society and economy we believe to be possible or desirable. The House Judiciary Committee’s report is an opening salvo in what’s likely to be a drawn-out contest over the future of the digital world, and our wider human world. It’s worthwhile to take some time to think through what’s at stake. I’ll pick up this thread next week.