The antitrust panel of U.S. Senate is going to meet later this month to look into the issues that bigger tech companies such as Amazon and Google, in order to avoid competition with smaller rivals and despite to go into healthy competition with them, rather seek to buy those small companies.
The hearing is scheduled to be held on September 24, said the Senators Amy Klobuchar, who is chairman and top ranking member from Democratic side on the antitrust panel of Senate’s Judiciary Committee, and Mike Lee, but they did not mention or list any witnesses.
The subcommittee is not only open but will welcomes and requests market participants, policy analysts and other stakeholders to contribute their input on whether any legal action should be taken against such mergers to ensure competitiveness in the digital markets, Lee said in a statement.
Acquisition of smaller companies by bigger tech giants has put a question mark regarding competition in markets, Klobuchar said in a statement, adding that big technology companies turned into most powerful organizations in the world. Such powerful organizations have to face a little competition whereas there are lots of examples when such influential companies bought start-ups that have been competing with those companies in almost all types of businesses.
Because of that trend of acquiring smaller rivals, big tech companies that count among most rich and influential companies in the world are facing antitrust scrutiny at different platforms which become increasingly intensified.
The U.S. Department of Justice said in July that it was going to begin an investigation of bigger digital technology companies to analyze whether they are involved in such practices that might be hurting the market norms for being anticompetitive. That investigation of DOJ is believed to be targeting Amazon.com Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc with Apple Inc likely to be included in that list.
