It’s Time to
Rein in Big Tech

Add your name to support bipartisan legislation to rein in Big Tech’s corporate greed and monopoly abuses.

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The ProblemBig Tech monopolies are abusing their power.

For too long, Big Tech monopolies have abused their unchecked power as gatekeepers of information, communications, and commerce to maximize corporate profits. As everyday Americans struggle with rising prices, Big Tech monopolies have exploited their dominance to turn record-breaking profits at the expense of working families. Unchecked corporate greed has allowed these monopolies to jack up prices and increase fees, all while stifling innovation and crushing small businesses.

Today, Big Tech monopolies exercise greater and greater control over our lives. Growing more powerful, and more ubiquitous, they operate with increasing impunity – abusing workers, bullying regulators, and antagonizing customers to line their own pockets.

Amazon uses its dominance to crush smaller competitors.

Amazon’s stranglehold over the digital economy is one of the top threats facing independent businesses. Amazon elevates their own products in search results—sometimes at highly discounted prices, absorbing the losses at the expense of small businesses. Amazon’s monopoly power has enabled them to hike annual Amazon Prime fees for consumers, add new surcharges for sellers that drive up the cost of goods across the economy, and shut down third-party suppliers without due process.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/business/amazon-the-brand-buster.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/amazons-new-competitive-advantage-putting-its-own-products-first

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/amazon-increases-the-price-of-prime-nearly-17percent-to-139-per-year.html

https://fortune.com/2022/04/13/amazon-new-fuel-inflation-surcharge-products-more-expensive/

Google exploits its monopoly in the adtech market.

Google’s corporate greed is fueled by unchecked monopoly power. Google doubled their annual profits last year in part by extracting exorbitant gatekeeping fees in its Google Play Store and charging more than twice its rivals for digital ads. Google was even fined a record €2.4 billion by the EU for manipulating search results to demote rivals and promote their own services.

Sources

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15872354/google-eu-fine-antitrust-shopping

https://www.vox.com/2017/1/19/14330498/google-boosted-own-products-search-advertising

https://www.france24.com/en/business/20220202-google-parent-alphabet-nearly-doubles-annual-profit

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-charges-more-than-twice-its-rivals-in-ad-deals-wins-80-of-its-own-auctions-court-documents-say-11634912297

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-play-app-store-revenue-reached-112-bln-2019-lawsuit-says-2021-08-28/

Apple hikes prices on consumers and squeezes out competitors.

Last year, Apple’s record-breaking profits were driven in large part by the $80 billion in monopoly rents extracted from developers for access to their dominant App Store, and in turn, the mobile market writ-large. They had the most profitable quarter in the history of the world to end the year, followed by a record Q2, prompting a $90 billion stock buyback. None of that stopped them from cracking down on a nascent unionization effort, fueled by outrage over Tim Cook’s $99 million annual compensation package.

Sources

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-made-more-money-than-any-company-ever-thats-not-even-most-impressive-thing-it-announced.html

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23128247/apple-accused-union-busting-nyc-world-trade-center-stores-cwa

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/18/apple-retail-stores-union-labor/

Meta leverages its monopoly power to elevate and interconnect its own platforms.

Meta only allows for interoperability of messages between its own apps including Instagram and Facebook Messenger. That’s no accident. This allows Meta to promote their own platforms and entrenched users in Meta’s universe of services, putting competitors at a disadvantage.

Sources

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/14/21369737/facebook-merging-instagram-messenger-chats-update

The SolutionIt's time to rein in Big Tech


Historic bipartisan legislation in Congress would rein in Big Tech’s monopoly power and corruption.

Better for You

Big Tech monopolies abuse their power to eliminate competition – which means they don’t have to care about your experience using their products. They have no incentive to prioritize your best interests and wellbeing or protect your safety and privacy. They face no consequences for the harms of their business decisions, like amplifying extremist content and health misinformation, exacerbating teen depression, and more. They should be competing for you by building great products, not exploiting you because you have nowhere else to go.

Better for Workers

Just since the start of the pandemic, Big Tech has bought up more than 50 other companies and grown $3 trillion richer – all while workers struggled to survive. Corporate giants like Amazon use their power to underpay, surveil, and abuse workers without any accountability. And thanks to their ever-expanding dominance of the labor market, Big Tech is leading a race to the bottom across the economy, depressing wages, and workplace standards across many different industries.

Better for Small Business Owners

Facebook, Google, and Amazon now control roughly 90% of both the digital advertising and search engine markets in the U.S. and the majority of all e-commerce, effectively leaving small business owners at their mercy if they want to reach customers online. Small businesses’ fate is often in the hands of these tech monopolists. They rig the marketplaces they operate in by imposing exorbitant fees, demanding oppressive terms, offering no transparency, and extracting valuable data from independent manufacturers and retailers that depend on its platform. These tactics often put sellers and manufacturers out of business.

Now is the timeTake Action!


Urge your Member of Congress to rein in Big Tech’s monopoly power with historic bipartisan antitrust legislation:

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