Top Democrat Slams Tech’s ‘Devastating’ Effect on Americans
Top Democrat Slams Tech’s ‘Devastating’ Effect on Americans
(Bloomberg) -- A top Democrat in the U.S. House said Thursday that big tech has had “devastating effects” on everyday Americans.
Speaking at an antitrust conference in Washington, Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who has opened an investigation into competition in the technology industry, said Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have acquired competitors to corner their markets.
Cicilline, who is also chairman of an antitrust subcommittee, said “you would be amazed” at the number of companies that have come forward with concerns about the potentially unfair way that big tech companies compete. Some have even expressed fear that the tech giants will respond with economic retaliation if the smaller companies’ concerns are made public, Cicilline said, without providing more detail. He said Congress has retreated from its active role in shaping antitrust law.
Email messages seeking comment were left with Facebook and Google.
Cicilline has become a leading figure responding to the rising calls from Democrats and some Republicans for tougher competition enforcement. The Judiciary Committee is investigating competition in technology markets while the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have divided oversight of the biggest companies, the first step toward formal probes. Google and Apple Inc. went to the Justice Department, while the FTC will be responsible for Facebook and Amazon.com Inc.
During a June 11 hearing that kicked off the House probe, lawmakers including Cicilline slammed online platforms for being unfair gatekeepers to content produced by traditional media outlets.
“Concentration in the digital advertising market has pushed local journalism to the verge of extinction,” he said at the time.
Seeking Solutions
The major challenge of his investigation, Cicilline said Thursday, will be to find a solution to competition issues in the tech industry -- whether it’s changing antitrust laws or making sure enforcement agencies have enough resources to carry out their mission. The problems are easier to identify and harder “to develop solutions around,” he said.
Cicilline said he has reached out to representatives of most of the major tech platforms and indicated that his hope is they will participate in a “meaningful way.” When asked whether he was prioritizing a company in the investigation, Cicilline said he wasn’t but mentioned Google and Facebook as particularly big and well-known.
“We’ve seen some conduct of Facebook in particular, some pretty egregious behavior and a pattern of bad behavior, apology tour from the CEO and then back to bad behavior,” the representative said.
His panel, Cicilline said, will explore why there hasn’t been a “serious antitrust investigation” in 20 years. “One thing I’m certain of is we are in this monopoly moment where I think people have begun to really understand the implications of this concentration in the marketplace. They expect us to address it in a thoughtful and responsible way.”
Asked whether the agencies had failed, Cicilline said, “Yes. Congress has failed too, in fairness. This has been a failure by everyone.”
Cicilline also weighed in on allegations of anti-conservative bias by large tech companies, which some Republicans including President Donald Trump have suggested could be a competition problem. Cicilline said there was “no evidence” to back that up.
To contact the reporters on this story: Naomi Nix in Washington at nnix1@bloomberg.net;Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Mark Niquette, Paula Dwyer
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