What to think of the five hours of the unprecedented hearing of the four CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA), this Wednesday, July 29? Hot, Barry Lynn, great slayer of the power of the GAFA, does not hide his satisfaction: “It is a day to be marked with a milestone. It exceeded our expectations. Parliamentarians have succeeded in bringing in new documents to subject leaders to uncomfortable questions ”, says the founder of Open Markets, a think tank that actively campaigns for the “Dismantling” digital giants.
The activist would not have denied the conclusion made by David Cicillin, the chairman of the session of the antitrust subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives: “These companies have monopoly powers. It must stop. Some must be dismantled, all must be properly regulated ”, launched the Democrat, after comparing Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Tim Cook (Apple) to oil and steel moguls John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
“Copy, redeem or kill”
Admittedly, this videoconference interview has, like the previous hearings, sometimes been a political and media spectacle. Republicans have spent their time accusing the platforms of being unfavorable to Tories and Donald Trump – and Google of collaborating more with the Chinese regime than with the US military. But the elected officials were better prepared than at the hearing of Mark Zuckerberg in April 2018: they quoted testimonies and projected on screen parts collected in their investigation launched a year ago. “They clearly scored points”, comments William Kovacic, formerly of the US competition authority (Federal Trade Commission, FTC) and professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington.
Mark Zuckeberg was confronted with embarrassing emails about the Instagram takeover, in 2012: “Instagram can hurt us”, entrusts the CEO in April to collaborators. To his CFO who asks him if he should buy this platform for “Neutralize a competitor, acquire talents, integrate products or for another reason”, the CEO replies: “The first and the third reason. “You saw this platform as a threat, so you bought it”, summed up influential Democrat Jerrold Nadler. Mr. Zuckerberg defended himself: Instagram only competed with Facebook in the field of photos, the company grew thanks to its takeover, the latter was authorized by the FTC … But the sequence marked. Facebook “Copy, redeem or kill” his rivals, assured Pramila Jayapal.
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