SAN FRANCISCO — The worm appears to have turned. In the week that Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s top competition cop, launched a market abuse investigation into Apple, David Cicilline, the congressman leading a Big Tech probe in America, accused his country’s biggest company of “highway robbery” over the 30 per cent cut it takes from the cash generated by its App Store.
Even Microsoft president Brad Smith, who spent a quarter of a century in an anti-trust fight with Washington, said the “time has come” for the authorities to look into just how Apple does business.
The sudden turn against the iPhone maker, which has avoided the slings and arrows aimed at Facebook, Google and Amazon, was remarkable. For Big Tech’s critics, it is the surest sign yet that the years of hand-wringing are over. The West Coast giants, they claim, are about to be walloped by a regulatory crackdown not seen in decades.
The showdown will even come with a photo op. Some time in the next few weeks, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Sundar Pichai of Google parent Alphabet will, for the first time, testify together in Congress. Apple’s Tim Cook is the only one who has not confirmed his appearance, although Cicilline expects him to show up for a line-up that will be redolent of the appearances of Big Tobacco executives in the 1990s, or Wall Street chief executives after the financial crisis. “I expect we’ll have all four CEOs there,” Cicilline told The Vergecast podcast. “This is the Congress of the United States conducting its first major anti-trust investigation in 50 years and their testimony is essential to completing this properly.”
Will it be different this time? Will the long-promised regulatory overhaul finally get over the line? And, if so, how far will it go? Will the titans be broken up, or forced to change their ways under threat of huge financial penalties?
For clues, look no further than Lina Khan, a 31-year-old lawyer who helped set in motion the reckoning three years ago. While a law student, Khan wrote an article for The Yale Law Journal titled Amazon’s Anti-trust Paradox. She argued that the legal conventions that had held since the 1970s had been lapped by the Big Tech platforms.
The article stoked a debate that still rages. For decades the guiding anti-trust principle in America has been narrow and simple: consumer welfare. If you were not using your power to overcharge customers, you were fine.
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