On Thursday, Amazon reported revenue up 40% to $88.9 billion, while Google’s parent company Alphabet and Facebook reported revenue above analysts’ estimates.Įach of these companies has been accused of anticompetitive practices that harm democracy, consumers, and small businesses.
#Amazon gets antitrust scrutiny data usage free
And so that then is a problem in terms of how you expect a free market to fix this.”įor context: Apple reported nearly $60 billion in profits and became the world’s most valuable company on Friday. They bought their competitors, put them out of business, whatever. But if you don’t fix it, then market power builds up and builds up and, in the case we have here, there are no competitors basically for at least three of these companies. “The way anticompetitive practices work, if you deal with them quickly, if you deal with them in a rifle shot, you fix it and the companies go on competing and everything’s fine. “By not doing anything for so long, we may have run out of options,” Reback said.
Nobody who understands antitrust law would suggest implementing restrictions cavalierly, Reback said, but regulators have already waited so long that it’s tough to see any viable alternative to reform. Reback blamed the outsized growth of tech giants in part on the Obama administration’s failure to take action. He said Sensenbrenner was correct in the sense that new legislation might not have been necessary if action had been taken earlier, but he stressed that there isn’t much antitrust enforcement happening today. Reback pointed out that convoluted antitrust law makes it difficult to bring cases to court. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) insisted that existing antitrust law is fine but needs enforcement. Register Now ‘We may have run out of options’ĭuring the hearing, a number of Democratic lawmakers argued that Washington needs to take steps to ensure a fair market.
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