U.S. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI 1st District), who’s leading a high-profile investigation into technology giants and who recently held a congressional antitrust hearing that included Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon is poised to deliver recommendations as early next month that may lead to an overhaul of antitrust laws.
Cicilline said in an interview Wednesday that his inquiry has confirmed that Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon and Facebook are abusing their market power to crush competitors and that Congress must act urgently to rein them in to protect consumers.
“All of these companies engage in behavior which is deeply disturbing and requires Congress to take action,” said Cicilline, the chairman of the House antitrust panel. “The kind of common theme is the abuse of their market power to maintain their market dominance, to crush competitors, to exclude folks from their platform and to earn monopoly rents.”
While he declined to go into detail about the panel’s recommendations, Cicilline said he is working to find common ground with Republicans on the “biggest, boldest ideas I can.”
Cicilline is highly critical of the Justice Department’s and FTC’s track record on antitrust enforcement. Officials in Republican and Democratic administrations haven’t done enough to curb the power of dominant companies, he said. The FTC, in particular, shouldn’t have approved Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, he said.
But even with tougher enforcement by the FTC and the Justice Department, Cicilline said his “gut” is that Congress still needs to update antitrust laws to address court decisions that have made it tougher to win cases and have led to dominant companies that are thwarting competition.
MacDailyNews Take: On, Cicilline is deeply disturbed alright, as evidenced by his inclusion of Apple in his antitrust hearing and investigation, a company that does not hold a monopoly position in any market in which it competes, alongside the likes of a true monopoly abuser like Google.
Leave Apple out of this.
Of the four companies that participated at the hearing, there is one company that is really stifling competition: Google.
When one search engine has 86% share of the worldwide market (and Google basically isn’t even used in China), there is far, far, far too much power concentrated in one company. The whole concept of the World Wide Web is destroyed when a sole gatekeeper basically controls what gets seen, read, and heard. It’s not open, it’s completely closed and controlled.
Publishers who want to be read, for example, spend an inordinate amount of time making sure they follow Google’s dictates, nebulously sussed from Google’s secret algorithm, formatting their sites, even writing their articles a certain way, including certain words they might not choose if allowed to write freely, simply to please Google’s algorithm.
If Google doesn’t like a site (imagine a site that believes Google’s Android is a stolen product and says so repeatedly), Google can hurt that site by, say, excluding that site from the News tab on Google (since 2009), so that the site is more difficult to find, hurting that site’s traffic and ability to generate revenue. (Is there a lawsuit there? Someday we might find out.)
Hopefully, lawmakers can come together to figure out a way to do something to remedy the horribly uncompetitive situation in internet search. Google is, and has been for years, a perfect example of why antitrust laws exist. — MacDailyNews, July 29, 2020
The instant that I say the headline, I knew that it had to be a piece of shit democrat.
Sure enough, it’s David Cicilline. As an former refugee of Rhode Island, I can say for certain the Cicilline is on the worst POS’s in the House
When Trump obeys Emoluments then you can talk.
Notice I’m not saying Tax Returns, that battle’s over. Just a matter of time. Even if re-elected.
Rhode Island is the most corrupt state in the union and that’s saying quite a lot (casts side-eye at NY, NJ, and CA).
Firstfuck: get over yourself. You make endless claims without a shred of evidence. Then when you are proven wrong, you attempt to discredit the data.
RI isn’t even in the top 10 most corrupt states. By objective measures, the worst would be Louisiana. But even LA pales in comparison to the swamp that Don filled. This administration has by far the most prosecuted corrupt friends in history.
But you knew that. Too bad that as a paid troll, you choose to claim the exact opposite of the truth whenever you think you can score points for your corrupt team.
It’s going to be such a treat to see you clowns wailing in the streets (when you aren’t rioting) after our President wins again. And he will, liberal crybaby.
Is Bannon also to be free to scam you brilliant alt right neofascists?
Warren Harding is Trumpets twin.
Firstfuck! Funny! Very funny!
Are you saying there’s no evidence of corruption in Rhode Island????
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/19/the-most-corrupt-states-in-america-infographic/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/19/the-most-corrupt-states-in-america-infographic/
What RI lacks in size, it makes up for in corruption and stupidity.
Obviously.
how trite! and you accuse others of being stupid. all you ever do is sling weak insults.
Stating that libturds are stupid and gullible is NOT an insult, they are facts.
Looking at the way you “form sentences” it’s no wonder people think you are stupid.
You should sue your English teachers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/19/the-most-corrupt-states-in-america-infographic/
Google doesn’t deliver simple and pure search results…they’re better defined as suggestion results.
Does it matter if I want a headphone jack? Does it matter if I want game content that Tim Cook doesn’t approve of? Does it matter if I want access to the ATA port that my Mac has? Does it matter if I want the software I paid for to keep working?
You guys get it for Google, but when Apple does this stuff, you keep making excuses for them.
What you are babbling has nothing to do with this issue, you imbecile.
I am with MDN on this fake issue regarding Apple, not the others, and I thank it for framing it clearly because now I have the language to educate my legislators when phoning them.
Your supposed representative doesn’t respect your language. He/she only listens to those who contribute to his re-election campaign (which is used like a personal slush fund).
hal and first will now explain to us all how his party is lily white, but everyone on the blue team is 100% guilty of anything you can dream up.
Indeed for the most part, still, I like to call because telling whoever answers what I want does not have zero effect; So at least I can educate the intern for the future. And of course the more money one donates, the more the representative obeys which is why big money gets away with writing the laws for the legislator to merely sign except for a few modifications to give the latter plausible deniability that this is not the process. I know that you know this though. The solution is to get big private money out of politics. We are working on it.
Did you learn to write in a 3rd world country?