Facebook, Google and Amazon face tough questions during congressional antitrust hearing

Facebook denies being a monopoly, Amazon denies unfairly competing with Marketplace merchants, and Google denies being evil

Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple faced tough questions from US House of Representatives' lawmakers during a congressional antitrust hearing on Tuesday.

The hearing, held by a House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee, is investigating whether big tech firms have abused their power and dominance to snuff-out competition in the market.

According to Bloomberg, lawmakers questioned the executives of Facebook, Google, and Amazon on the scope and size of their businesses on Tuesday.

Colorado Representative Joe Neguse, asked Facebook's head of global policy development Matt Perault whether he thought his company was a monopoly. "No, congressman, it is not," Perault responded.

Neguse then named some of the world's largest social media platforms (based on the number of active users). Neguse revealed that Facebook was the easily the biggest social media platform, while Facebook-owned WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram were third, fourth and sixth, respectively.

"When a company owns four of the largest six entities, measured by active users, in the world in that industry, we have a word for that," Neguse said, "and it's monopoly, or at least monopoly power."

In the hearing, Perault denied allegations that Facebook's planned integration of Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp services was intended to thwart calls to split the properties.

"There are many services in the market that offer more privacy-protective services," Perault told Jamie Raskin, a Representative of Maryland.

In the hearing, Raskin had described Facebook's announcement as a "ploy", which coincided with increasing demands to split off Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook.

The hearing was led by Democrat David Cicilline of Rhode Island.

The representatives of all four companies claimed that they faced tough competition from several rival companies in their respective industries. All four representatives also highlighted that their companies were contributed in the growth of the US economy and helping to create more jobs in the country.

Amazon's representative, Nate Sutton, was asked questions about how his company may be killing competition in the online retail sector, as well as potentially harming smaller merchants on its site - the focus, announced today, of an EU antitrust investigation.

One member of the committee claimed that Amazon might be identifying and copying some popular products on its website.

"We use data to serve our customers," Sutton responded, adding that the company doesn't use "individual seller data to directly compete with them."

Sellers, however, suspect the opposite.

Google's representative was questioned by committee members over claims that the company is unfairly favouring its own services in user searches, enabling it to direct traffic to its own sites over rivals'.

All the major tech companies in the past one year have faced rising levels of criticism from lawmakers, as well as the public, over various issues, including their handling of users' data.

Earlier this week, the US Federal Trade Commission imposed a fine of $5 billion on Facebook over the sharing of user data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

In recent months, many lawmakers have demanded a break-up of the company, although EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in May that a forced break-up of the company should be a remedy only of the very last resort as that would involve a long legal battle.

Last month, a group of Alphabet's shareholders (Google's parent company) urged the firm to split itself into separate companies before regulators force it to do that. The proposal was, however, rejected by the company.