Prospect: Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took a well-deserved victory lap after Amazon announced it would be opening new corporate offices in New York City, months after it pulled out of opening a second headquarters in the area.
Read More
The New York Times' Jack Nicas and Daisuke Wakabayashi report that home-speaker maker Sonos said Google and Amazon stole its technology and abused their power, but it could only risk suing one. "The fear of retaliation is a real fear. Any of these companies could bury them tomorrow. Google could bury them in their search results. Amazon can bury them in their search results,” Sally Hubbard told them.
Read More
Voice of America’s Michelle Quinn reports that the “era of Silicon Valley’s operating largely free from government may be coming to an end.”
Read More
The New York Times' Steve Lohr, who has covered the tech industry for more than two decades, explains how we may be entering a progressive era of antitrust. He speaks with Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn on the changing political landscape. “The environment is radically different than it was even a year or two ago,” Lynn told him. “It’s a grass-roots rebellion against concentrated power.”
Read More
On Yahoo Finance, Roger Parloff tells the story of how America has come to a turning point in its views of antitrust. He tracks the origins of the progressive neo-Brandesian movement and how key figures have played leading roles in igniting the Big Tech antitrust backlash in Washington including Tim Wu, Barry Lynn, Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, and Luther Lowe. Parloff quotes Former FTC chair William E. Kovacic who commented: "In five years, Barry and his group have changed the debate. They’ve gone from being a largely unnoticed fringe body of commentary to being at the very center of the debate.”
Read More
The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Google’s Project Nightingale also revealed a potential dark side to the projects. Ascension, it noted, “also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show.”
Read More
“The Wall Street Journal has finally confirmed that Google engineers search results to serve its own private interests and those of big advertisers and other giant corporations,” said Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn. “It’s way past time for our federal and state governments to fix Google.”
Read More
The Wall Street Journal reported that Google plans to start collecting the health data of millions of Americans as part of a cloud-computing deal with Ascension, one of the largest health systems in theUnited States. This comes after Google’s recent announcement that it plans to acquire Fitbit, the maker of fitness-tracking devices, which will give Google access to the personal health data of millions of Fitbit users. Yet, even if Google lives up to its promise not to use health care data for nefarious purposes, a big problem remains, and it should be getting more attention. Google’s growing size alone makes it an ever more tempting target for hackers.
Read More
Ahead of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing today on the perspectives of the antitrust agencies on tech monopolies, and in light of the news of Google’s undisclosed partnership with one of the largest health care systems in the United States, the Open Markets Institute along with eight other public interest groups are demanding that the Federal Trade Commission block Google’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit.
Read More
The Hill reports on Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, pressing top officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over Google's proposed acquisition of fitness tracking company Fitbit. Cicilline cited a letter by Open Markets and eight other public interest submitted to the FTC calling for the acquisition to be blocked.
Read More
On November 13, 2019, the Open Markets Institute, the Center for Digital Democracy, Public Citizen, EPIC, along with Commercial-Free Childhood, Consumer Federation of America, Oakland Privacy, Media Alliance, and Consumer Action submitted a letter to the Federal Trade Commission demanding to block Google’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit.
Read More
WIRED's Gilad Edelman writes that Google's moves into health data will test how serious antitrust enforcers are about privacy issues. “These promises about what they’re going to do with data in the context of merger approvals deserve absolutely no weight,” Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard told WIRED. “Especially when you’re talking about a company that has persistently violated the privacy laws, been repeatedly fined—a persistent recidivist when it comes to privacy violations.”
Read More
Washington Post's Rachel Siegel and Tony Romm report on Google's $2.1 billion acquisition of smartwatch maker Fitbit. Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard told them that regulators has been "slow to the game" when it comes to looking at how data fortifies the monopoly power of corporations such as Google. “That’s a source of their dominance,” Hubbard said.
Read More
New York Time's David McCabe writes that Attorney General Xavier Becerra is in Google and Facebook’s backyard. But unlike nearly all other state attorneys general, he won’t say whether he’s investigating them. McCabe reports that on Oct. 1, eight groups who have advocated more aggressive scrutiny of companies like Facebook and Google wrote to Mr. Becerra asking to discuss their concerns with him. Sarah Miller, the deputy director of one group, the Open Markets Institute, said they wanted “to offer to share our views, to hear his views and to help brief or provide educational support.”
Read More
On October 17, 2019, Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn testified before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on 'The Nature of the Threats Posed by Platform Monopolists to Democracy, Liberty, and Individual Enterprise.’
Read More