Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Communicators Is Big Tech Too Big

Right, i think the obvious answer to that is absolutely. The members of the subcommittee, both the democrats and a number of the republicans really focused in on the power of these corporations over the way we communicate and the way we engage. That was the dominant theme of the hearing. They also got into the god of how these businesses work and how they use their dominance and how theyre engaged in predatory behavior and how they are hurting other businesses, small, medium and everyday families. It was really quite remarkable hearing, night and day from the hearings that we saw just a couple of years ago when members of congress were grilling Mark Zuckerberg. Yesterday was i think a pretty remarkable moment in the Ongoing Investigation into monopoly power in general, but especially in regards to tech platforms and Digital Markets. Host congresswoman comstock. Guest i think yesterday we saw with Congress According to gallup today had an 18 Approval Rating and was attacking four of the Great American Success Stories and these are companies who have Approval Ratings in the 70s and 80s and they have gotten us through this pandemic over the last five, six months where there is connecting us with work and connecting us, we have zoom here and a new company that has come on during this pandemic but also connecting us with our healthcare telehealth has boomed over these months and connecting our children with education which we now looks like that will go into the fall. Theyve been helping Small Businesses. I think that is an area where we discussed this yesterday but all of these things, i think, demonstrate that the Tech Companies come from the world. When you think over the past five, six months what has work been in your life . Your smart phones have worked. You been able to google things or if you use another platform you can look up information on duck, duck, go and you been able to connect with family and friends through calls like this and able to get your loved ones in connection with their doctors and this was the world at work where congress with their 18 Approval Rating is not getting things done. Covid, the economy and i think they are tone deaf and certainly the chairman has been saying if the American People do not understand what tech is doing an American People understand that pretty well because when they were trying to get those unemployment checks it was the tech comedy that had to go into the states and help them upgrade their technology so they could get their unemployment checks. If the Tech Companies are working with Healthcare Providers and a lot of that they have done that voluntarily and donated money and even helping newspapers and theyve got funds for that so i thank you got a real contrast between the world at work which i was privileged to represent a lot of these companies in the ecosystem they create witches although Small Businesses and the next facebook or the next amazon and i think there is a real contrast and that we did not hear a lot about the consumer welfare because the consumer like these companies. Host sarah miller. I think one thing to note is that there arent going to be more facebook, more amazon and more googles. Our antitrust workers and policymakers have allowed these handful of corporations to amount an enormous amount of power over their respective markets and to shut down competition and engage in predatory behavior that has really tamped down on the economy. These corporations rose to power because antitrust laws and policy makers focused on maintaining competition and markets when they were very small and that focus shifted away and in fact, policymakers have encouraged this monopoly power in tech and across the economy and one thing that came through in yesterdays hearing was that we hear a lot of rhetoric about standing up for Small Businesses and yesterdays hearing actually put forward the voices of Small Business people who are being preyed upon by these corporations, amazon, facebook, google, they have so much power as gatekeepers over our economy and commerce and that really came through. Members of congress or members of that subcommittee listed up the voices of Small Businesses whose livelihood have been arbitrarily cut off by these corporations or businesses or Business Models and products have been relentlessly copied or acquired under anticompetitive reasons and that was really remarkable. These numbers understood how the companys work and understand the predatory practices they are engaging in to maintain and grow their dominance and they stood up for the first time in my work in politics in a meaningful way for small better businesses. I think congress is 18 Approval Rating would go up we found more of this. Host sarah miller, when you talk about predatory practices, could you give an example . Sure, amazon owns a platform that is more than 2 million businesses used to reach customers. Even more in the pandemic when so many businesses have to reach customers through online means. What amazon also does is sell their own products on that platform. They had the benefit of seeing all the data that goes to that platform through that other merchants and businesses in sales. What they have done with the data is use it to copy other visits products and the preference their version above the other products. This is a practice referred anecdotally happened regularly. That is one problem. The other problem is just that they have so much information about the corporations and they tied their own services together. If you want to sell a product on amazon what you see is you might have more ability to reach customers if you use amazons fulfillment services. This timing is something that is not legal and should be enforced against and hasnt been and and extracts huge fees from Small Businesses. Yesterday [inaudible] came out with a report saying amazon charges 30 fees for businesses that transact honest platforms up from just 18 a couple of years ago. That extraction hurts Small Businesses and attacks on businesses and it is one that members of congress yesterday spoke out against and held the corporations accountable for. Host Barbara Comstock, what is your response to what you have heard . Guest i think we heard a lot but i think the things they were talking about were often anonymous and then they wouldnt let the different Business Leaders really respond to the detail like knowing when they were talking about your information as someone would try to explain that you can delete your Search History and if you dont know how to do that you can go onto google and how do i delete my Search History and you can find out but they did not want to hear the answers and i thought the hearing yesterday was much like the hearing the day before with attorney general barr where they had already made their decision and they were telling their stories or anecdotes and they wouldnt really let the different Business Leaders trying to describe that. I think they were trying, the business, ceos were trying to explain the business that we run and trying to explain it and it didnt quite fit in their 30 seconds they wanted to tell the story but i think when you or i have to strongly disagree with the concept that we arent going to see more about these companies and you see people largely on the left complaining about we dont want to have these Big Companies but china has a lot of the Big Companies. That is our competition here. When you look at the Tech Companies 11 of them are american, nine are chinese. European model which many want to follow and certainly the chairman of this committee wants to, they dont have big tech because they dont look at the consumer welfare and they are looking at all these other issues that the democrats were looking at. Republicans were attacking the more [inaudible] issue and not the antitrust issue but the antitrust issue at stake here is consumer welfare and if they have an overwhelming market. Ironically, those were their nobody talked about, they all compete with each other. And with other Big Companies like microsoft. When you look at browsers, Internet Explorer was the top 110 years ago and now chrome is prayed that came through competition. Yahoo was the original search engine. Remember yahoo . There was a 1998 company that said how they won the search wars and they are the new aol and no one can compete with them. And then this is a 2007 cover of Forbes Magazine where they said nokia and who will how it will be catch up with nokia . In 2007 the iphone came out and then you have Americans Companies did compete. I think ten years from now you will see a lot of Different Things going on in this space and in these particular leaders understand you have to innovate or you die. Keeping up but the competition is the example of we are on zoom. Zoom came out of nowhere and was a winner essentially during the pandemic because they provided aid service to consumers but i dont mean members of congress i worked with the Tech Community a lot but i would not pretend to be an expert on technology and certainly these members of congress have never run a business or try to start a company. They are stories that you can read books and yahoo lost their dominance so i think lets let the free market work this out and that has always been the republican and i was certainly happy to see [inaudible] whose work on this a long time to talk about we dont need new antitrust laws but we can look at particular examples and see if they are in violation but we dont need the kind of new laws that the chairman is talking about when we go in and break up our most Successful Companies and investing billions and billions of dollars and some of these companies are investing 20 billion in r d so that we can compete and combine governments with certain development and the e you lost in the tech space a long time ago and the chairman is trying to advocate for the use dominance and we wont have these Great American Success Stories anymore. Host ms. Miller. These corporations extreme market dominance, amazon has 75 of the ecommerce. Facebook and google controlled Digital Advertising markets and have a monopoly and apple controls the app world which is out millions of developers reach consumers but there is a whole range of issues both related to market power and the predatory behavior that that market power enables these companies to participate in. It was remarkable to me that you essentially had Mark Zuckerberg and jeff pesos admitting to acquiring competitors to shut down competition rather than investing in innovation that congresswoman comstock is talking about. That has been the strategy from the beginning to buy up competitors, squats competition and to maintain their dominance through strategy of monopolizing markets and networking if expert on another point, its a good scare tactic but our economies have not been successful because we have a handful of goliaths that do not innovate and maintain a dominant position. China has infinite state capital to support the large institutions but our strength in the economy has always been because of our dynamism and because of the invasion that real competition creates so this is a myth we should look towards in our authoritarian communist regime to model our economies after and its really dangerous one. Facebook, amazon, google, they are all squashing innovation and crushing competition and at the same time hurting businesses all across the country and really making or putting People Livelihood out of business. I think that some of these talking points about china is a scare tactic quite honestly. It is not rooted in a historically made our economy so strong which is our ability for somebody with a idea to compete and grow that way. That is not how corporations are growing out. In the very beginning yes, they were innovative, no question. They delivered Important Services but they can do that in an environment that is competitive and essentially the failure of antitrust and policymakers to understand how these corporations were achieving dominance and to buy into their talking points about being innovators really has been a huge problem for the last 12 years or so so i think congresswoman comstock point about 2007, early 2000 needs to be updated. We have not seen that innovation in years and that is because we cannot compete anymore in a realistic weight against facebook and google. They can crush you and cut off your ability and amazon. I want to make clear that my point on china is china has a very different model and im not advocating for that at all. Im advocating for us to continue the light touch regulation, not the heavy government invest in [inaudible] is telling us he knows how to run a tech company and to decide what pieces should be together or not and i think we need, the reason we have succeeded for years in the tech space and had bipartisan support was because we have the Tech Companies who are thriving on the American Companies and american Success Stories and yahoo passed up the opportunity to buy google and some company said i will not be bought and then they go to be huge successes. Certainly if you listen to ceos yesterday when jeff besos left his job and started out when the. Com bubble hit in the late 90s he wasnt even profitable then but he stayed at it. These are american Success Stories that are working and here we are on zoom and another american Success Stories but we want to have American Free market and what were saying is we dont want to adopt the european model. The chinese model is off the table but china is competition when you look at areas like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, our major Tech Companies are making Major Investments and they have been helping nih in our healthcare communities to make sure and to help us with cure for diseases. They are grow with google or help Small Businesses and certainly if you want to start up a business we grow with google or with amazon and use their tools you can go off and start your own company. The next google or the next facebook will calm from the talent pool that these companies support. I think the most important thing that the u. S. Government should invest in and these companies certainly do is the Talent Pipeline and Human Capital and all of these companies are companies that have been invested in people and invested in education and creating that pipeline and talent and they are so important to that and certainly the u. S. Government are the things i worked on in congress for more money with the tech Talent Pipeline because those are the jobs of the future and those are the jobs that will make the United States able to [inaudible] and it will be a challenge for the environment with china and the threats we face with them, not by adopting china tactics but by adopting the Good American Success Story that has allowed our tech communities to be number one in the world and people who talk about breaking it up, what will come after that . You dont no, you and i cannot run Tech Companies. I want to the people who know how to do this to go out and do this and let thousands of flowers bloom and allow the ecosystem for the great talent and community is to have that Talent Pipeline and have companies that can innovate, make mistakes and all the companies you had it before have made mistakes and event failures as well as successes and that is the story of technology and when i work and i remember in virginia when we lost the community and they have all these its mostly Small Businesses and it is the ecosystem that you want to create, not your tax system or regular system but galatians will make it harder, more regular will make it harder for that next start up to get further. People like steve kaser are going around talking about the rise of the rest so lets create that ecosystem without attacking the countries or companies sor sorry. Host congresswoman, what about sarah Millers Point that these large Tech Companies are prohibiting smaller entrepreneurs from entering the market . Guest i dont see that but if there are companies and they come forward and there is a system under current antitrust law where they can look at it and its a consumer standard and if they are