Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon CEOs cited after Washington

The CEOs of GAFA. © Amazon, Google, Apple & Facebook, Montage Trending Topics

Ok, July 27th will be a legendary day. This Wednesday in three weeks there will be a historic hearing by the US House of Representatives antitrust committee, to which all four CEOs of the largest IT corporations in the United States are invited. The prominent guest list a.k.a. Witness list would bring tears of joy to every event manager and reads as follows:

Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple
Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
"Since last June, the subcommittee has been examining the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and their enforcement," the committee said. The statements of the CEOs are crucial to complete the investigation.

The question of how and whether the GAFA groups are influencing competition in their favor or whether smaller players are imposing their conditions on the market has been smoldering for a long time. Google has already been fined billions in the EU because of this, as reported Apple has recently also been targeted by the EU competition authorities. This time it's about the rules in the App Store and the restrictions with Apple Pay. Amazon is also rumored to receive an EU competition complaint.

Hearings experience
There are also several studies on the market dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon in the USA. Mark Zuckerberg, Sunbar Pichai and Tim Cook are known to have had hearings in Washington - they had to justify themselves for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for influencing search engine content and for avoiding taxes on committees.

Interestingly, no Microsoft representative was invited to the hearing. As reported, there are also allegations against the software giant from Seattle. Slack CEO Steward Butterfield recently reported that Microsoft would prefer its communication tool to teams using Windows 10 (Trending Topics reported). Microsoft has kept out of the firing line after the antitrust lawsuits many years ago and is now relying heavily on open source and collaborations.