The US Judiciary Committee has officially confirmed that the Antitrust Hearing set for next week is delayed. This congressional hearing featuring CEOs from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google was officially set for Monday. However, it was later postponed due to the memorial services for the late Representative John Lewis, a Civil Rights icon.
Notably, Jeff Bezos, the Chief Executive of Amazon, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook where all set to testify on Monday before the Antitrust Committee. A report is expected to be provided by the committee related to potential antitrust law changes.
This will be the first time, the CEOs of major companies will collectively testify at a single House hearing. Although the hearing is delayed, a new date is not officially announced yet. As per Reuters, after this delay, “officials are discussing rescheduling the hearing for late next week or the following week.”
What is this House antitrust hearing?
Well, this hearing is the pinnacle in the ongoing investigation into the big-four companies and is centered on antitrust laws. For the unaware, these antitrust laws are in place to avoid any single company from becoming herculean. Besides, this is done in order to promote healthy competition among companies and prevent rival-practices.
And the name of these big-four companies in this probe is well defined, as they have become a huge influencing company in their respective fields. This investigation started in June 2019 to basically evaluate the company’s antitrust and competitive policies. Moreover, this probe has already been delayed from early-April to now, sometime in fall.
According to sources, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is on a move in preparing a case against Google. On the other hand, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating Facebook and Amazon. Note that the congressional committee’s probe will not be directly enforced onto these big-four companies, namely Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. But can be brought into effect by DOJ or FTC investigation.
In our earlier report, we have highlighted that it has almost become clear that these tech-giants are not functioning properly when it comes to competitive practices. So, the main agenda of this probe is to examine the antitrust policies of these companies and if required, formulate a new antitrust policy standard for all the tech companies.
Earlier, it was reported that Pichai, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Cook will be defending their growing power in the market. Moreover, they would be claiming that they themselves face strong competition. This will eventually deflate the congressional claims that they are dominant forces in the industry.