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A crackdown by the federal government would target Big Tech, resulting in a severe penalty Monday on Wall Street.
Alphabet Shares Inc.
GOOGL, -6,12%
GOOG, -6.11%
, Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN, -4.64%
, Facebook Inc.
FB -7.51%
and Apple Inc.
AAPL, -1.01%
were criticized Monday after a series of reports released since Friday afternoon, claiming that these companies are subject to regulatory control by the Trump administration. The Google divisions of Alphabet, Amazon and Apple would be under investigation by the Ministry of Justice, while the Federal Trade Commission would investigate Facebook.
On the evening of Monday, the Judiciary Committee of the House also announced its intention to investigate competition in the technology sector.
Alphabet and Facebook were the hardest hit: Google's parent company fell 6.1% and Facebook's 7.5%. Amazon fell 4.6% and Apple fell 1%.
These four companies are among the five most profitable technology companies in the United States, with a combined market capitalization of nearly $ 3 trillion. Only Microsoft Corp.
MSFT, -3.10%
– One of the largest antitrust investigations against technologies in US history, at the time of the ups and downs of the Internet bubble, has so far avoided the surveillance of technology.
Apple was the last to face such a problem, Reuters reported Monday that the Justice Department had "jurisdiction" for a possible investigation from Apple while its leaders were giving the kickoff of the conference Worldwide developer of the iPhone manufacturer. Earlier Monday, the Wall Street Journal had announced that the FTC, which was already investigating Facebook for violating its privacy and was about to impose a multibillion dollar fine, had obtained the right to do so. open an investigation into the giant of social networks, considered as monopolistic. practices.
On Saturday, the Washington Post said Amazon's e-commerce giant could face stiffer anti-trust scrutiny from the FTC, but does not say on what basis. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Justice Department was preparing the opening of a federal antitrust investigation into the search giant Google. The FTC conducted an extensive Google survey in 2013, but took no action.
None of the companies immediately responded to requests for comments on Monday.
Although the government has not publicly commented, the federal actions announced tend to change the discourse on government oversight of large technology companies, whose services cover billions of people around the world. and whose market valuations are in trillions. of dollars. In the absence of federal laws governing the collection and use of personal information, legislators and privacy advocates are demanding heavy fines, a form of self-regulation or pure dissolution. and simple big influential companies such as Facebook and Amazon.
"The ability of these companies to use their size and access to huge amounts of information to manipulate market forces and potentially stifle competition is raising concern among antitrust regulators." said technology day lawyer Peter Day in a phone interview at MarketWatch. "This has led to a debate over whether these companies represent a new expression of a monopoly."
The debate is relatively recent in the United States, where Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), Presidential candidate, called for the dissolution of Amazon, Facebook and Google, and candidate Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) Put Facebook in his sights. (On this issue, Klobuchar, fierce critic of President Trump and co-author of a data protection bill, agrees with the president.)
At the same time, the issue is flourishing in Europe, where the European Union has imposed a record $ 5.6 billion fine on antitrust authorities last summer for abusing the dominance of its system. Android operation, the third of this magnitude in three years. Streaming Music Service Spotify Technology SA
SQUARE, -2.21%
This year, the European Commission has been seized by the European Commission of a complaint that Apple uses its App Store to disadvantage its competitors.
The European Union's General Data Protection Act provides for a fine of € 20 million, representing 4% of the company's total turnover, whichever is the higher. It has not yet imposed a significant fine as local authorities strengthen their workforce and companies become more familiar with the regulations.
Decline pushed some large downward indexes Monday, led by the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP -1.61%
, which decreased by 1.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA, + 0.02%
, which counts only Apple among the four components, avoided the decline with a barely positive day, while the S & P 500 index
SPX, -0.28%
decreased by 0.3%.
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