US antitrust task force targets technology giants

Bloomberg

US antitrust enforcers are zeroing in on technology giants following years of criticism that they haven’t done enough to rein in dominant internet companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc.
The Federal Trade Commission said it’s creating a task force led by senior competition officials and 17 staff lawyers to investigate potentially anticompetitive conduct by technology companies. It will also look at completed mergers in the industry that could be unwound if they turn out to be harmful to consumers. “This industry continues to grow in importance and complexity, and it poses challenges for antitrust enforcement,” Bruce Hoffman, the head of the competition bureau, told reporters on a conference call.
The creation of the task force signals FTC Chairman Joe Simons’s desire to bring more scrutiny to tech giants in the US following aggressive enforcement by European antitrust officials against Google and Facebook. A chorus of lawmakers, lawyers, economists and policy advocates have criticized the US for its mostly hands-off approach to tech markets.
“It’s hard for us to know what kind of anticompetitive behavior is going on behind the scenes,” said Charlotte Slaiman, a policy counsel for Washington-based policy organization Public Knowledge. “I hope having this extra focus on it will
uncover that.” The FTC under a previous chairman in 2013 closed a 20-month antitrust investigation into whether Google unfairly skewed its search results. The decision not to take enforcement action against the company was a blow to rivals that claimed the company’s dominance in internet search was harming competition.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank whose board incl-udes executives of technology companies, said task force isn’t a surprise given the antitrust criticism directed at industry.
“There’s this growing tech backlash and there’s a growing movement of what one could call the anti-monopoly left who sees any big firms as suspect,” said Rob Atkinson, president of ITIF. “We put those two things together, and I believe there’s a real risk that the FTC could go too far here and begin to question or take actions against large technology firms simply because they’re large.”
The announcement of the task force was ridiculed as a “joke” by Matt Stoller, a fellow at Open Markets Institute in Washington, which advocates for aggressive antitrust enforcement.