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Big Tech CEOs Misled, Denied and Evaded in Congress

Statement of Alex Harman, Competition Policy Advocate, Public Citizen

Note: Four Big Tech CEOs – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – testified today before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law.

The majority on the committee clearly demonstrated that Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook have engaged in anti-competitive and illegal behavior. But the CEOs mislead, denied and evaded as they stumbled through the hearing.

Despite the irrefutable evidence of his own words, Zuckerberg blatantly evaded questions about Facebook’s anticompetitive tactics of copying, bullying and buying competitors to maintain his monopoly. And despite evidence, Cook denied Apple’s practice of bullying developers into accepting the predatory terms of its market-dominating App Store.

Meanwhile, over the course of the hearing where Bezos deflected questions about his company’s past and current predatory business practices, he became $500 million richer as Amazon’s stock climbed.

It’s time to break up and regulate these companies, which have profited off exploiting consumer data, hurt innovation by competing unfairly and threatened our democracy and elections.