Are big techs monopolies?

This week, the House Judiciary Committee presented a 449-page report that concludes the findings of a 16-month congressional investigation on four companies with a total market cap of $5 trillion: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. In this report, the word “monopolies” are mentioned 120 times. It is obvious that these four companies shouldn’t go on as they are today. Some law makers think new laws should be propose to govern these cooperation and big tech should be broken up.

 

Below are some of arguments and some questions to the arguments:

 

Google

Google’s search engine is at the monopoly level in this market and so as their search advertising. It forces websites to pay bidding fees to keep their website on top even with direct search.

House thinks that Google collects people’s location data from millions’ Android phones to help make their map better, and that prevents other companies to do the same and no other mapping companies can compete. Would users are better off to trust a bunch of smaller mapping companies with their location data? At least Google has the resource to keep their data secure from data breach. 

 

Amazon

The report suggests that Amazon treats small businesses that sell products on Amazon unfairly. Amazon promotes its own products over third-party sellers, and it is notorious for using the sales data to copy third-party sellers’ products. 37% of these third-party sellers rely on Amazon as their sole income source. Amazon argues that forcing Amazon to not sell its own products on the same platform will force millions of small business out of e-commerce.

 

Apple

The lawmakers think that Apple has a monopoly on app marketplace with App Store. App store forces developers to use it to reach their end users and Apple takes 30% of the revenue generated by the apps.

Apple argues that “The App Store has enabled new markets, new services and new products that were unimaginable a dozen years ago, and developers have been primary beneficiaries of this ecosystem.”

 

Facebook

Facebook has been accused of anticompetitive by acquiring its competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp. It has monopoly power in the social networking market, and one could argue that the mergers were collusion.