The US’s four largest tech firms all responded to a congressional antitrust report that suggested Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have become too powerful and might need to be broken up, reported Techcrunch.
The companies claimed that they all compete fairly, with Amazon slamming “fringe notions” of antitrust in a blog post filed shortly after the report’s release.
The House Judiciary Committee released its tech antitrust report, concluding that the big tech platforms should face additional regulation. The report has prompted forceful responses from four of the companies targeted by the report: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
In a blog post entitled “Fringe Notions on Antitrust Would Destroy Small Businesses and Hurt Consumers,” Amazon stated it’s done nothing to deserve such criticisms. Amazon dismissed the committee’s views as “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing,” while Apple stated it “vehemently” disagrees with the report’s conclusions.
In a similar rebuttal statement, Google protested that a forced break-up would only hurt consumers, claiming that the committee report used outdated, inaccurate allegations made by the company’s rivals.
“Free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them,” Google stated. “We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. … Americans simply don’t want Congress to break Google’s products or harm the free services they use every day. The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals.”
Facebook took exception with congressional assertions that the social media giant acquired burgeoning new companies to clone them and then put them out of business. “Facebook is an American success story,” the company stated, according to published reports. “We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people.”
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