U.S. Faces Bumpy Antitrust Road Despite Big Tech’s Emails, Memos

U.S. tech giants have enormous influence over what we buy, read, see and think. But is their market power illegal? At a July 29 House hearing, lawmakers leveled monopoly-abuse accusations at the leaders of Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. We sift through the charges, compile the evidence, summarize the CEOs’ defenses and ask the experts if the lawmakers made their case.

The allegation: Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who chairs the House antitrust subcommittee, fired off the hearing’s first question to Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai: “Why does Google steal content from honest businesses?” Cicilline said Google uses that content to create a “walled garden” and to keep users on Google properties rather than directing them to other sites that originated the information. He said an internal Google memo from 2006 observed that other websites were getting “too much traffic” so Google decided to “put an end to that.” When Google began showing restaurant reviews from Yelp Inc. in 2010, he said, the website asked Google to stop. In response, Google threatened to delist Yelp. “The choice Google gave Yelp was ‘let us steal your content or effectively disappear from the web,’” Cicilline said.