After years of calling Big Tech too big, Democratic lawmakers are calling for
Those proposals are in a 450-page report issued Tuesday by a House antitrust panel, which undertook a 15-month investigation into the companies’ market dominance. Here are five big takeaways.
MORE BARK THAN BITE?
With the election less than a month away and a new
The Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice-President
MONOPOLY OR MONOPOLY-ISH?
The report said the four companies have abused their market power by charging excessive fees, imposing tough contract terms and extracting valuable data from individuals and businesses that rely on them. But it stopped short of declaring them all monopolists.
The report found that Google holds a monopoly in search and that Facebook has monopoly power in social networking. But it merely said that
BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO
Forcing the companies to break up would be a radical step for
Still, the companies have powerful lobbies and many of their CEOs retain some star power in
BYE BYE, BUY BUY BUY
The report attributes the “significant and durable market power” of the companies in large part to “a high volume of acquisitions.” This, it concludes, has led to fewer choices for consumers.
Facebook “used its data advantage to create superior market intelligence to identify nascent competitive threats and then acquire, copy, or kill these firms,” the report states. Google, meanwhile, “maintained its monopoly over general search through a series of anticompetitive tactics” including an “an aggressive campaign to undermine vertical search providers.”
The report suggests placing restrictions, potentially even a ban, on future acquisitions by the companies. It's worth noting, however, that many of the products people rely on would not be what they are today if the companies hadn't acquired them. This is true for Google's YouTube and the technology for its maps and Android, Apple's Siri and Facebook's Instagram and
ANOTHER REPORT
Though the report was “bipartisan,”
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