Big Tech’s Showdown With Congress
CEOs Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) were (virtually) brought before the House Judiciary Committee for a hearing ostensibly about antitrust concerns regarding big tech.
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If you have most of a day to kill, you can watch the entire hearing on YouTube.
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If you want something even more concise, the BBC breaks the five-hour ordeal into five key points[…]
The only thing more predictable than members of Congress using hearings to make statements instead of ask questions, and when they do ask questions, usually of the “gotcha” variety, refusing to allow witnesses to answer (even as those witnesses seek to run out the clock), is people watching said hearings and griping about how worthless the whole exercise is.
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Lina Khan, who rose to prominence with her 2017 law review article Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, and who served as counsel for the antitrust subcommittee over the course of the investigation that culminated in Wednesday’s hearings, summarized the New Brandeis Movement of antitrust in 2018[…]
Previously:
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Given what happened to Charlie Monroe today, Tim Cook should be DRAGGED BACK in front of Congress to explain why Apple has the power to "cancel" any developer, no matter how many years they've been one, at any time, inside or even outside their appstore system.
No platform vendor should have the power to cancel a developer who sold me a perfectly good app, that I've upgraded and used for years, at any time for their own reasons. Ever. Whose machine is it anyway? I paid for it, why is Apple "asserting ownership" over it?
Notarization is cancer. In business terms Apple can "tortuously interfere" with any app I have bought even on SetApp, Paddle, or anywhere outside their ecosystem. It's really none of their business, and has never been their business. I didn't buy a glorified Apple TV, I bought a PERSONAL COMPUTER to do my affairs. And that's NONE of Tim Apple's business.
Apple made an App for Tortuous Interference, they can "Patreon" any app they want, at any time, and not give a reason. That is what Notarization really is, and if you're going to push back on Apple, now is the time.
If FedGov needs to open anti-trust on Apple over this, they should. This is more egregious than anything Microsoft ever did with "the browser in the OS" thing. Apple cannot be trusted with the level of power that "Notarization" gives them.
They've demonstrated that.
