Rep. David Cicilline, the Democrat leading a high-profile investigation into technology giants, said in an interview Wednesday that his inquiry has confirmed that Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon and Facebook are abusing their market power to crush competitors and that Congress must act urgently to rein them in to protect consumers.
“All of these companies engage in behavior which is deeply disturbing and requires Congress to take action,” said Cicilline, the chairman of the House antitrust panel conducting the inquiry. “The kind of common theme is the abuse of their market power to maintain their market dominance, to crush competitors, to exclude folks from their platform and to earn monopoly rents.”
Cicilline said the House antitrust panel intends to issue its report as soon as September, which would allow him to offer legislative proposals in this session of Congress.
Cicilline’s comments are the most extensive yet on where his committee is focused as it nears the end of its yearlong investigation. While he declined to go into detail about the panel’s recommendations, Cicilline said he is working to find common ground with Republicans on the “biggest, boldest ideas I can.”
One possibility is what he described as a Glass-Steagall law for technology platforms. That Depression-era law separated commercial and investment banking until it was repealed during the Clinton administration. For tech companies, it would mean prohibiting them from running a platform and competing on it at the same time.
Cicilline declined to specifically endorse the idea of separating functions of platform companies, but said in a separate Bloomberg TV interview that it’s a “really interesting idea” that’s worth careful consideration.
The committee’s report will address four broad areas, he said: changes to existing antitrust laws passed more than a century ago; reforms aimed specifically at the tech sector; strengthening private antitrust litigation by plaintiffs; and ensuring antitrust watchdogs at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have the resources to do their jobs and are staffed by aggressive enforcers.
Cicilline is highly critical of the Justice Department’s and the commission’s track record on antitrust enforcement. Officials in Republican and Democratic administrations haven’t done enough to curb the power of dominant companies, he said. The commission, in particular, shouldn’t have approved Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp, he said.
But even with tougher enforcement by the commission and the Justice Department, Cicilline said his “gut” is that Congress still needs to update antitrust laws to address court decisions that have made it tougher to win cases and have led to dominant companies that are thwarting competition.