Dipayan Ghosh writes that on Wednesday, Congress will have the opportunity to ask important questions to four big tech company CEOs representing companies that many feel have become overly powerful.
It is a unique opportunity: Never before have we had such a vaunted occasion featuring the tech industry’s barons all testifying together — and this will indeed be Jeff Bezos’ first appearance before Congress.
The stakes are high — for the industry, yes, but especially for the American consumer.
But why does a topic as dry as platform dominance, as the House Judiciary Committee puts it, matter so much to ordinary Americans?
After all, Americans love their tech — and many of us couldn’t live or work without an always steady, high-speed internet connection. We love scrolling our Facebook and Instagram feeds — and especially appreciate the latter’s artistic simplicity. Many of us have relied on Amazon Fresh for grocery deliveries during (and long before) the Covid-19 pandemic. The iPhone is possibly the most beautiful widely available consumer device. And I’ll admit — I’ll quite often spend hours on YouTube catching up on politics and sports.
But as Silicon Valley tightens its stranglehold on the digital media environment every year — especially so in 2020 as we have relied ever more on technology to help stay connected through the coronavirus outbreak — the silent danger of the domination over digital media achieved by these four firms looms large.
It is a complex problem. These companies are each « monopolies » in their own respective rights, with Facebook, Google and Amazon possessing shares of at least half of the overall market in social media,internet search and online book sales respectively. Developers have meanwhile accused the App Store, available through Apple’s closed iOS, of being a monopoly. Each company is vitally important in today’s media environment.
But it is one thing to possess a monopoly and quite another to cause harm based off of the market power afforded through that monopoly position.
I see three broad public interest areas in which the big four firms should present serious concern to every American — and indeed could implicate the national economy in various ways if nothing is done to rein in their market power: Consumer prices, quality of services rendered and innovation in the marketplace.
