The House of Representatives of the US Congress accused Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple of monopoly and recommended dividing them into many small companies.
According to the CNBC portal, the investigation of the situation around the technology giants took the American authorities about 16 months. As a result, the US Congress outlined its findings in a 449-page report.
Below are some of them.
Amazon
- sellers on Amazon are hostages of the company’s volatile tactics. For many of them, trading on the Amazon platform is the only source of income;
- Amazon is aggressively pushing out competitors. Being a platform, it can find out which products are the most popular on the market. On the basis of these data, the trading giant creates cheaper analogues.
Apple
- The Apple ecosystem has brought “significant benefits” to both consumers and app developers. Nevertheless, the company abuses control over iOS and the App Store.
- the owners of the social network do not just suppress competitors, but use “murderous takeovers” against them — Facebook buys other firms, copies them and then destroys them;
- Facebook Instagram arranged an internal collusion and forbade its acquired companies like Instagram and WhatsApp to really compete against social networks.networks;
- Due to the lack of external competition, Facebook does not monitor the confidentiality of user data.
- Congress describes Google’s behavior as an “ecosystem of interconnected monopolies.” In his opinion, the corporation closely monitors all user actions, secretly monitors competitors through programs like Android Lockbox and manipulates the issuance of advertising through its search engine.
These companies have too much power, this power must be restrained and subjected to appropriate supervision and coercion.
Recommendations of the Congress
- divide Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple into several small organizations and prohibit them from accessing related business areas;
- oblige corporations to provide equal conditions for all products and services, and not to give preference to their own;
- to empower the antimonopoly authorities to consider mergers of dominant corporations as anticompetitive;
- increase the budget of the US Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Ministry of Justice;
- get rid of “problematic incidents” in the antimonopoly legislation.
Also on the topic:
- Facebook accused Apple of hindering competition in an appeal to the European CommissionIndian Startups want to create their own store to avoid paying Google commission
- Spotify, Epic Games and Match Group formed a coalition against Apple’s policy
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