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Members of Congress will question technical administrators at a hearing. Let’s hope they don’t waste this opportunity.
By the Editorial Committee
The editorial board is an organization of opinion hounds whose reviews are reported through experience, research, debate and long-standing safe values. It’s separated from the newsroom.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Congress’ attention will briefly be directed to the issue: global domination. On Wednesday, Facebook,Amazon, Apple and Google’s parent company Alphabet will appear in combination to protect themselves in an ongoing investigation into their market strength through the Congressional subcommittee targeting antitrust laws.
The scope of the virus means that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet will attach a video chat to the audience, thus avoiding the eyes of photographers, members of Congress and the gallery while peppered with questions. Fix In your home office, men can also receive messages of help on how to respond.
The challenge for the subcommittee will be if those generation corporations, which have accumulated an immeasurable force, function as illegal monopolies in certain areas, such as online search (Google), online markets (Amazon), mobile app outlets (Apple), data distribution. (Facebook), advertising sales (Google and Facebook) and mergers and acquisitions.
It is not illegal to be the largest search engine, online market or social network. But antitrust laws, designed to protect companies that oppose power in the higher market, do not allow corporations to suppress festivals, a practice known as exclusionary behavior, through, for example, crushing or engulfing potential rivals. Freed from the festival, corporations can also cross the line by squeezing suppliers or charging higher costs to consumers.
Wednesday’s hearing will be the culmination of a year-long investigation into business activities and will likely be the last public forum before the subcommittee publishes its findings, which is expected by the fall.
Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat and chairman of the subcommittee, said that generation corporations would possibly not like the results and called the strength of business “terrifying” this month.
It is up to the subcommittee to help the public perceive the scope of corporate force and, in all likelihood, propose that regulators dissolve them or take other measures. The question is also whether existing regulations are sufficient given the market strength of generation corporations and whether the legislation wants to be up-to-date because corporations are behaving with tactics that are illegal. Here are some queries that subcommittee members ask the following questions:
The subcommittee will most likely deal with the company’s relationships with third-party merchants who use the site to sell directly to consumers. These merchants account for approximately 60% of Amazon’s sales. The company also operates a massive shipping network, an advertising sales company and a cloud computing service that can alert regulators. Amazon’s great sales knowledge provides you with incredibly detailed data about consumers and merchants.
An Amazon attorney told the panel, “We don’t directly use individual seller knowledge to compete” with other corporations on the Amazon site. But a Wall Street Journal report showed that Amazon is doing just that, helping it create personal label products as they undermine its competitors. How does Amazon use seller knowledge?
Amazon offers its distributors worldwide storage and shipping. What are you looking for in return, beyond a commission? Does Amazon use small merchant sales knowledge to locate new products or to help larger merchants succeed by forcing smaller ones?
In 2010, Amazon reduced the value of diapers well below profitability, in a successful effort to force a competitor, Diapers.com, to participate in the acquisition negotiations. Since then, Amazon has closed this site. Are Amazon exclusive to those moves? Is the company involved in other wars of value of this kind to force a competitor to sell?
Research by the Washington Post showed that Amazon is pushing customers toward their personal label products even when they seem to need to buy well-known brands. Does Amazon prioritize its own products in customer searches? Do you rate rates or ad purchases from merchants or brands so that your products succeed in the most sensible search?
Although Apple is known for its iPhones and laptops, it also faces a healthy festival of corporations like Samsung and Lenovo in hardware sales. As a result, Cook will most likely be asked about designing apple’s App Store, where millions of software developers offer their apps to download.
Why does Apple allow its own app store on iPhones?
Sometimes developers must offer their in-app purchases and paid subscriptions through the Apple App Store, which on their own websites, where they can avoid Apple commissions. Apple has threatened to remove apps that do not comply. How does this most productive serve the interests of consumers and app developers?
The Federal Trade Commission reportedly had documents indicating that Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 with the particular aim of stifling a competitor. Were those documents misunderstood? How did Facebook gain the acquisition of Instagram benefit from consumers and how did it reach the value of $1 billion?
British lawmakers have posted emails saying Facebook was using an analytics app to gather detailed knowledge about competition in order to suppress them. This helped Facebook buy WhatsApp for $19 billion, according to the emails. Couldn’t we call it an abuse of market power? Does Facebook still use patented knowledge about its rivals to protect its market leadership?
Advertisers can target consumers on Facebook with incredible accuracy, thanks in component to the platform’s ability to track user browsing activity on the web. Shouldn’t users be onerous? Also, did Facebook offer assurances about the confidentiality of visitors’ knowledge, which it later denied? What promises do consumers have that their knowledge will remain personal and will not be reused for Facebook?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has reversed its efforts to make its site less politically debatable because partisan content leads to greater use of the site, which is for its advertising activities. How can you think of suppressing opposing opinions for users as more than just abuse of power?
Transcription
Alphabet’s flagship product, Google, is at the heart of almost every one of the activities on the Internet and, increasingly, many activities off the web. It is by far the dominant search engine and operates giant advertising and cloud computing companies. Subcommittee members will likely perceive how Google’s search activity potentially drowns out the festival by selling theirs and how YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, streams content to users.
Google has paid Apple billions of dollars to the default search engine for the Safari Internet browser on iPhones and iPads. How does Google expect its competition to compete on an equivalent basis if it has captured such a giant share of the market?
Google controls several levers in the procedure of hitting classified ads on the web, adding analytics. The company also asks some companies to use their advertising generation if they need to use Google’s services. What are the benefits of generating Google ad sales for advertisers? Why doesn’t Google allow marketers to see the costs others pay to position classified ads? Does that stifling bargaining power?
Critics claim that YouTube streams videos that have political leanings, based on the knowledge of its users, meaning that the audience is very likely not to see competing reviews. Is it true that YouTube software is designed to harm? In addition to keeping users on YouTube longer, what is the goal of this system?
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