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According to senior law enforcement officials in Louisiana, Nebraska and Tennessee, fines are not sufficient to restrict companies such as Google and Facebook, at a conference held Wednesday in New York. Omaha, Nebraska.
"What we need to do as attorneys general is to steal a currency from businesses," said Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson. "I think we have to go fast, I think we need to be very thorough and thoughtful, and I think that once we have gathered the information, we have to consider breaking things or not."
Several States are preparing surveys on the technology sector, according to two people familiar with the subject. At least a dozen states are involved, according to a third person familiar with the discussions.
In his speech in Omaha, Tennessee's attorney general, Herbert Slatery, said that a "government-driven structural change may well be needed" to cope with the power of large technology platforms.
And Louisiana's Attorney General, Jeff Landry, said he feared the consequences of leaving the power of the technology industry uncontrolled.
"What can happen is that corporate power can become bigger than the power of government and then it becomes bigger than democracy itself," he said.
The state attorneys general of 41 states, along with Washington DC and Guam, signed a letter to the FTC on Tuesday, saying that the huge amounts of personal data held by the major technology platforms were isolating them from the competition and making it more difficult Entry into the small business market. .
The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by CNN, also urged the agency to take a tougher view of mergers and acquisitions in the technology sector. And he calls for privacy as an antitrust issue, echoing the remarks made by Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim in a speech Tuesday in Tel Aviv.
The highest official in charge of competition control at the Justice Ministry announced exactly how big technology platforms such as Apple, Facebook and Google might soon be under investigation.
The major digital markets such as research, Internet advertising, social networks, desktop and mobile operating systems, and the sale of ebooks are dominated by "only one or two major players". said Mr. Delrahim.
"Where competition is affected, consumers and markets are losing with higher prices, lower quality, lower innovation rate, reduced freedom of speech and even weaker privacy protections" added Delrahim. "Protecting competition, is protecting all these dimensions of competition."
Delrahim's remarks are the most expansive yet in terms of regulatory risk facing the largest companies in Silicon Valley. The speech offered not only an exhaustive list of issues that could be considered by antitrust regulators, but also arguments about the extent of supervisory authority over these areas.
The speech follows a recent agreement between the DOJ and the FTC, which is given the responsibility of overseeing various technology companies. Under this agreement, the DOJ acquired jurisdiction over Google, told CNN three people familiar with the case. The agency is also reported to have been monitoring Apple, while the FTC has assumed responsibility for Amazon and Facebook.
The agencies do not seem to have yet opened official inquiries. But Delrahim gave clear indications of his thinking in the discourse, which established explicit parallels between the current moment of technology and the earlier breaks in the Standard Oil and AT & T monopolies.
He also discussed the US government's historic antitrust case against Microsoft, whose teachings, according to Delrahim, can be applied to other technology markets.
In particular, the combination of Internet Explorer by Microsoft with the Windows operating system has threatened manufacturers of independent Web browsers and raised anti-competitive concerns. Some policy experts have compared the Microsoft case to the recent European sanctions imposed on Google, targeting the way it has linked proprietary applications – such as YouTube and Maps – to its system. Android operation. Since then, Google has changed its approach to licensing in order to comply with the sanction of the European Union.
Delrahim also made an explicit claim on confidentiality issues, which, he said, are tied to competition as far as healthy market companies can work to outdo themselves in regards to concerns privacy protection features. While the treatment of privacy and user data by technology companies is not traditionally considered antitrust, it is a major complaint to industry critics.
The speech was delivered the same day the House Judiciary Committee launched its own antitrust investigation into the entire information technology sector by holding a public hearing on Silicon's impact. Valley on the local media.
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