Big tech antitrust hearing delayed as probe gets underway
A US hearing at which the chief executives of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook were meant to testify has been postponed, as politicians press on with a probe into allegations of anti-competitive behaviour.
The hearing in front of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel was meant to take place next Monday, but is instead now said to be scheduled for August.
The committee has received 1.3m documents from the companies so far to assist with the probe, officials said last night.
Reuters reported yesterday that the chief executives — Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — will defend themselves by saying their companies face intense competition.
A report from the panel could be released by late summer or early fall, officials said, which will recommend whether new laws are needed to end the companies’ dominance of their respective sectors.
In May, the committee’s chair had demanded Bezos testify and threatened Amazon with a subpoena, after reports surfaced that Amazon uses data from small sellers on its platform to make decisions about its own competing products.
All the chief executives are now appearing voluntarily and no subpoenas have been issued.
Some Republicans this week called for Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to also be brought in for questioning, following a hack on its platform this month that affected high-profile users such as former US President Barack Obama.
Twitter is much smaller than the other four companies, and holds much less of a market share. For example, Twitter reported 166m daily active users last quarter, compared to Facebook’s monthly 1.73bn users.