The United States Department of Justice announced last week that the Department’s Antitrust Division is reviewing whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers.
By: Bettina Clarkson
The Department’s review will consider the widespread concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed about search, social media, and some retail services online, DOJ said. The Department’s Antitrust Division is conferring with and seeking information from the public, including industry participants who have direct insight into competition in online platforms, as well as others.
“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division. “The Department’s antitrust review will explore these important issues.”
The goal of the Department’s review, DOJ pointed out, is to assess the competitive conditions in the online marketplace in an objective and fair-minded manner and to ensure Americans have access to free markets in which companies compete on the merits to provide services that users want. If violations of law are identified, it added, the Department will proceed appropriately to seek redress.
The new antitrust inquiry under Attorney General William Barr “could ratchet up the already considerable regulatory pressures facing the top U.S. tech firms. The review is designed to go above and beyond recent plans for scrutinizing the tech sector that were crafted by the department and the Federal Trade Commission,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“The two agencies, which share antitrust enforcement authority, in recent months worked out which one of them would take the lead on exploring different issues involving the big four tech giants. Those turf agreements caused a stir in the tech industry and rattled investors. Now, the new Justice Department review could amplify the risk, because some of those companies could face antitrust claims from both the Justice Department and the FTC,” the newspaper added.
The step is the most powerful yet by Attorney General Barr towards Big Tech, which according to CNBC “faces increased scrutiny from both political parties because of the expanded market power the companies have and the tremendous amount of consumer data they control. President Trump, a regular critic of Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos, has claimed that Facebook is biased against conservatives and recently agreed with an assessment by tech investor Peter Thiel that perhaps Google should be investigated for not working with the U.S. government on a cloud project.”
