The antitrust investigation of US tech giants accentuates with an internal document request



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Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have all been invited to submit internal documents as part of a growing antitrust investigation.

The latest development of the US antitrust investigation on Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook has asked the four major technology companies to submit their internal documents.

Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee and its Antitrust Subcommittee sent letters to businesses on Friday to request communications from eight executives at Amazon, 14 at Apple, 14 at Google and 15 at Facebook.

The letters all explain that the purpose of the investigation is to examine "competition issues in digital markets; whether dominant firms engage in online anticompetitive behavior; and whether antitrust laws, competition policies and current levels of enforcement are adequate to address these issues. "

The letters also asked each company to provide "all the information" about each company's respective market share for its wide range of services and a list of its top ten competitors.

In the case of Facebook, the documents also ask him to explain his decision to cut Vine, Voxer, Stackla and other applications from his social graph.

At the same time, Larry Page, leader of the Alphabet, was asked if there were any discrepancies between the way Google treats Chrome and that of competing browsers, as well as the prevalence of advertising fraud on properties. Google techniques.

Amazon was notably questioned about its discussions with book publishers, especially the negotiations from 2009 to 2015 on the opportunity to interfere with the availability of a publisher's book on Amazon and on the issue of to know if the company's algorithm had already been organized which exerted increased commercial pressure on these publishers.

Amazon has also been asked to provide detailed information on many of its notable acquisitions, including online bookstores such as BookDepository and AbeBooks.

The department's communications demonstrate the depth of control that these companies will soon experience and come with subpoena threats if companies do not comply. William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, told the New York Times: "These interrogations take on a totally different tone. This is a significant escalation of the process. "

Amazon app icon. Picture: Mactrunk/ Depositphotos.

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