Monopolies and consolidation are a problem throughout the economy, Klobuchar said, citing funeral caskets and cat food as two unexpected industries that also are facing competition issues.
“My goal is to build support for passing legislation,” said Klobuchar.
She emphasized examining antitrust issues across a wide range of industries — and not just Silicon Valley — could help bring Republicans and other moderate Democrats on board with her approach.
This week’s hearing schedule highlights the different approaches the House and Senate are taking to changing antitrust law.
As Klobuchar focuses on antitrust issues economy wide, her House counterparts are holding a hearing specifically concentrating on how Facebook and Google impact competition in the news business. The House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, led by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), has been hosting a series of hearings specifically focused on concerns about tech giants’ power.
The back-to-back timing of the hearings underscores the broad momentum to address antitrust issues in Washington. They’re coming as President Biden has tapped two prominent critics of Silicon Valley’s power to join his administration. Biden is expected to nominate Lina Khan, a prominent antitrust scholar who is known for her work on Amazon, to join the Federal Trade Commission. Tim Wu, who is known for his work on tech antitrust issues and coined the term “net neutrality,” announced he joined the National Economic Council.
Klobuchar said Khan’s and Wu’s “outside of the box” perspectives are needed after Washington has gone so long without taking action to rein in Big Tech.
“We need some disruptive thinking,” Klobuchar said. “We need people who are going to think differently than the status quo about how we go after this. I think it’s healthy that we have competition of ideas here.”
House and Senate lawmakers say they are committed to working together to address antitrust issues.
Klobuchar yesterday joined Cicilline, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) in introducing legislation aiming to help media companies more effectively bargain with Google and Facebook, by temporarily exempting them from certain antitrust laws. The bill was originally introduced in the previous Congress, but the urgency to pass it has increased following Facebook and Google’s threats to limit their services in Australia, as the country weighed legislation to force them to pay publishers for news.
“They knew there wasn’t a realistic alternative,” Klobuchar said. “You see this replicated in so many areas, and so that’s why I want to make sure we’re stepping back and looking at monopolies.”
With the legislation coming up again and the House hearing on Friday, tech companies are attempting to defend their record on working with the media industry. Google earlier today launched a new website touting its various initiatives to funnel money into the global news business.
Klobuchar says that’s just the beginning of the work she plans to do with Cicilline on antitrust.
Cicilline recently told The Technology 202 that lawmakers are preparing to “soon” introduce legislation addressing the findings of their months-long investigation into tech companies’ power. And Klobuchar says she’s closely watching what he and other members of the committee unveil.
“Cicilline was very happy when I introduced my bill, and he’s going to do piece of that bill,” Klobuchar said. “I’m going to see what they’re doing, and do parts of their bill.”
Our top tabs
Facebook asked a judge to dismiss major antitrust lawsuits, arguing it hasn’t harmed competition or consumers.
The social media giant said that two major antitrust lawsuits are “attacks on what Facebook did long ago” and don’t prove that the company holds monopoly power, Rachel Lerman reports. The filings preview how the company plans to fight the most significant legal challenges to its power in the company’s history.
The two lawsuits, by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, allege the company acted as an illegal monopoly for years, based on the findings of months of investigations into the company and its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.
“Antitrust laws are intended to promote competition and protect consumers,” the company wrote. “These complaints do not credibly claim that our conduct harmed either.” The agencies are expected to file a response to the motion next month.
New York attorney general Letitia James (D) pushed back on Facebook’s filing.
“Facebook is wrong on the law and wrong on our complaint,” she said in a statement to The Verge. “We are confident in our case, which is why almost every state in this nation has joined our bipartisan lawsuit to end Facebook’s illegal conduct. We will continue to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook’s unlawful behavior.”
Apple refused to allow Parler on its app store, dealing a major blow to the right-leaning social network.
The rejection comes two months after the conservative darling was booted from the Apple App Store and other tech platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Rachel reports. The decision is a blow to the app’s efforts to overhaul its policies and crawl back online in recent weeks.
Parler laid off its three remaining iOS developers, according to Bloomberg. Apple said in a letter to Parler obtained by Bloomberg that recent changes to the service are not sufficient, and it included screenshots of swastikas and white nationalist imagery that continued to be available on the platform.
“In fact, simple searches reveal highly objectionable content, including easily identified offensive uses of derogatory terms regarding race, religion and sexual orientation, as well as Nazi symbols,” Apple wrote. “For these reasons your app cannot be returned to the App Store for distribution until it complies with the guidelines.”
QAnon adherents are turning to coronavirus denialism, showing the dangerous impact of the conspiracy theory.
After months of tech companies purging their accounts, encrypted group chats with hundreds of thousands of QAnon followers are spewing ludicrous claims about the pandemic, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report. The phenomenon underscores how the extremist movement’s followers have found new online homes and targets even after Trump left office, and many of their political conspiracy theories failed to materialize.
“As energy around its election-related conspiracy theories loses momentum, the Q movement has doubled its focus on themes like covid-19 denialism and vaccine skepticism,” Rita Katz, executive director of the online extremism-tracking SITE Intelligence Group, said. The movement’s followers are trying to undermine confidence in the vaccines, which scientists say are safe and highly effective tools for controlling the coronavirus.
Hill happenings
Thirty Democrats introduced a new $94 billion proposal on Thursday to expand access to broadband Internet, in an effort to address the digital divide that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, my colleague Tony Romm writes. The effort led by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Klobuchar is one of the most ambitious in years.
Read more on the package from Tony:
Inside the industry
Trending
Rant and rave
Twitter users had some strong reactions to the New York Times story on buying power that fans of influencers have. Journalist Dave Levitan:
Charlie Warzel, an opinion writer at large at the Times:
Poet Saeed Jones perhaps said it best:
Daybook
- A Senate Judiciary Committee panel holds an antitrust hearing today at 10 a.m.
- The Brookings Institution hosts an event on the government’s role in reducing bias in algorithms on Friday at 9 a.m.
- A House Judiciary committee panel holds a hearing on technology competition and the press on Friday at 10 a.m. Microsoft president Brad Smith is expected to testify.
- Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the chairman of a government commission on artificial intelligence, testifies with other commissioners at a joint hearing on Friday at 11 a.m.
- Former National Institute of Standards and Technology director Walt Copan and former United States Patent and Trademark Office director Andrei Iancu speak at an event on innovation hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Friday at 11 a.m.
- The Brookings Institution hosts an event on harassment in online gaming on March 15 at 3 p.m.
