Amazon, Google and other tech giants could face DOJ antitrust probe

Stocks of Facebook, Google and Amazon have gone down after DOJ’s announcement

The United States Department of Justice recently announced that it will launch an antitrust probe into the world’s most influential and biggest tech companies.

The Antitrust Division of the department that has the responsibility to review and enforce issues related to monopolies, price-fixing, competition and mergers, said that the review will be considering the concerns that business, entrepreneurs and consumers have expressed regarding social media, search engine and few online retail services.

Makan Delrahim, Antitrust Division head said that there are chances that the digital platforms are unresponsive towards their customer demands, due to a lack of disciplined and meaningful competition that is based on the market. The antitrust division of the department will be exploring such important issues, Delrahim added.

Apparently, the DOJ did not name any company, but the list of leading online marketing platforms generally includes Facebook, Google and Amazon. These companies have been accused of stifling competition by either being too big for other competitors to exist against or performing dishonest tactics. The stocks of all those three companies have tanked after the announcement took place.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have been planning a divide-and-conquer approach for the regulation of the tech sector with Federal Trade Commission looking after for Facebook and Amazon while the Department of Justice poised to handle Google and Apple.

Reportedly, there are several other institutions looking into these tech’s actions from the past few months. The House Antitrust Subcommittee introduced a bipartisan investigation to check the competition in digital markets. David Cicilline, Rep. of the Subcommittee chair said that U.S economy and political challenges were being pressed owing to the growth of monopolies.

Seemingly, the traditional bricks and mortar retailers have been requesting regulators for updating the antitrust policy so that they could control companies that dominate the market, like Amazon and Google.

 

Source credit- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/justice-department-launches-antitrust-probe-into-big-tech/