Four Big Tech CEOs -- Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple -- are set to answer for their companies' practices before U.S. Congress as a House panel caps its yearlong investigation of market dominance in the industry.
The four command corporations with gold-plated brands, millions or even billions of customers, and a combined value greater than the entire German economy. One of them is the world's richest individual ; another is the fourth-ranked billionaire . Their industry has transformed society, linked people around the globe, mined and commercialized users' personal data, and infuriated critics on both the left and right over speech.
In its bipartisan investigation, the panel collected testimony from mid-level executives of the four firms, competitors and legal experts, and pored over more than a million internal documents from the companies. A key question: Whether existing competition policies and century-old antitrust laws are adequate for overseeing the tech giants, or if new legislation and enforcement funding is needed.
Each company has a distinct profile and sets its widening footprint in specific markets, and each tech titan has his own approach and story to tell. He addresses the issue of Amazon's power in what he describes as a huge and competitive global retail market. The company accounts for less than 4% of retail in the U.S., Bezos maintains. He affirms his rebuff to critics who call for the company to be broken up: Walmart is more than twice Amazon's size, he says.
Zuckerberg has said the company aims to allow as much free expression as possible unless it causes imminent risk of specific harms or damage. "We believe in values --democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression -- that the American economy was built on," he says in his testimony prepared for the hearing.
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