After more than a year investigating potential monopoly power among tech companies, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust this fall released an historic report calling for Congress to take action to restore open markets and economic democracy online.
The report was as thorough as the investigation: 450 pages detailing the business models and wrongdoing of the four big tech platforms Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The section outlining the harmful conduct of Amazon, the wealthiest and perhaps most powerful company in tech, alone topped 70 pages.
The report told a clear and compelling story about how Amazon has built its monopoly in online retail and cloud computing, and how it has leveraged that power to build its businesses in adjacent industries at the expense of smaller rivals and its own customers. In the report, the committee also laid out steps lawmakers should take to break the grip of the tech monopolies and restore democracy to online markets — including breaking up and regulating Amazon.
Today, we’ve partnered with the Open Markets Institute to highlight the committee’s findings about the Amazon monopoly, and its recommendations for how Congress can liberate the economy from Amazon’s stranglehold.
This summary follows our two-page brief on the committee’s report, as well as our petition for small businesses to demand Congress take action against Amazon’s harmful monopoly.
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