The Washington Post, July 2020
Members of a House subcommittee summoned the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google on Wednesday to grill them on how their companies maintain, enhance and abuse their monopoly power.
Over the course of the five-hour hearing, it was hard to know who seemed sillier — the politicians outraged that profit-making companies had tried to buy up rivals and use their platforms to favor their own services, or the executives who couldn’t understand why anyone would think that their companies had even the slightest bit of market power over suppliers and customers.
Of course, any honest search for who is responsible for the rise of Big Tech would also include the members of Congress themselves, who for three decades have sat on their thumbs as judges infatuated with free-market ideology were allowed to so hollow out American antitrust law that regulators are now almost powerless to restrain the tech giants. At this point, only a major rewrite of the industrial era antitrust statutes can bring the tech titans to heel.
