Thursday, July 30, 2020

Big Tech's Antitrust Paradox

Wednesday's House hearing with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google showed the bipartisan hostility to America's most successful companies.

In cloud computing services, Amazon faces competition from Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and more.

Apple's iTunes must contend with Spotify and Amazon Prime.

Businesses can avoid Facebook because they have other online places to reach consumers-including Amazon and Google.

Some 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses sell via Amazon, and the company says more than 200,000 had more than $100,000 in sales in 2019.

A classic example is the way Amazon cajoled Barack Obama's antitrust officials to bring a case against Apple for trying to compete in e-books.

Justice won its case after the Supreme Court declined to take Apple's appeal, but the result has been to make Amazon's e-book dominance more secure.

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