Four major tech CEOs are scheduled to testify Wednesday before a House antitrust subcommittee that is examining their power in the marketplace.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai will defend the size of their companies, which are being examined as potential monopolies.
The hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law begins at noon ET and is expected to go on for several hours, as up to 15 members of the subcommittee have a chance to question the executives.
The hearing is an unusual collection of wealth and influence. Two of the four CEOs, Bezos and Zuckerberg, are among the wealthiest people in the world, with more than $265 billion in accumulated wealth between them, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Their presence alone makes the hearing likely the biggest concentration of corporate wealth ever to appear before Congress.
The corporations they lead are among the world’s most valuable and influential, touching the daily lives of billions of people and piling up huge profits even during a pandemic. Apple is currently valued at $1.6 trillion, Amazon $1.5 trillion, Google’s parent Alphabet at $1.04 trillion and Facebook at about $656 billion.
Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., has been investigating the tech industry for more than a year and is preparing a report on possible anti-competitive practices. That report could later serve as the basis for legislation.
Cicilline’s report will “likely call for Congress to change antitrust laws to make it easier to sue dominant tech companies,” Paul Gallant, an analyst with the investment bank Cowen, said in a note to clients this week. “If Democrats sweep in November, that bill has a reasonable chance of enactment” in late 2021, he said.
The nation’s major antitrust laws, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, were all written more than a century ago. The Sherman Act, which led to a wave of trustbusting, was the first major U.S. law to restrict monopolies.
The four executives will testify virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, and some lawmakers could also appear virtually. Of the four, Bezos is the only one who has never testified previously before a congressional panel.