NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, about the testimony of four Big Tech CEOs.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
For more than a year, Congress has been investigating the giants of tech. The fear is that these companies have gotten too big. This antitrust investigation has gathered 1.3 million documents as evidence. And this week, it all came to a head as the leaders of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google testified before a House committee over video chat, of course. All four of those companies are NPR sponsors. The chair, Democrat David Cicilline of Rhode Island, said these companies have too much power.
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DAVID CICILLINE: This investigation also goes to the heart of whether we as a people govern ourselves or whether we let ourselves be governed by private monopolies.
SHAPIRO: Congressman Cicilline has been leading the investigation and joins us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
CICILLINE: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
SHAPIRO: So after a year-plus of this investigation, what did you learn from this hearing that you didn’t know before?
CICILLINE: I think what we mostly heard was the things that we have been very focused on in terms of the market dominance of these platforms. And using that market dominance to favor their own products and services, to bully competitors, to weaponize data, to harm consumer privacy and a variety of other anti-competitive behaviors were really acknowledged by these four witnesses. They really didn’t have any defense to many of the business practices that were the subject of the questions.
And so, you know, we will now complete the process of writing a report that will describe this digital marketplace broadly and then make some recommendations in terms of legislation and regulatory action to get competition back into the digital marketplace.
