Tech Brief: The Big Tech Power Play

• Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google on Wednesday sat down for an antitrust hearing with U.S. lawmakers, marking the first serious attempt to regulate the Big Tech and investigate alleged abuses of monopoly power. Here's a quick look at what was revealed as part of the testimony:
• Facebook bought Instagram partly to eliminate competition and it admitted to adapting (or copying) features from its rivals to stay ahead.
• Amazon planned to undercut Diapers.com before buying its parent company Quidsi in 2010 and its decision to buy Ring was based on its "market position – not technology."
• Google allegedly threatened Yelp to delist its reviews if it couldn't feed them into its own search products.
• Apple blocked in-app purchases of Kindle books on iOS after Amazon ran a series of advertisements on how users could seamlessly access their content between iPhone and Android, removed rival screen time apps from the App Store due to concerns for childrens' privacy, and its war against Right to Repair was rife with uncertainty.

• Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, however, feigned ignorance when asked about the Onavo data scandal, claiming he was not familiar with the events that led the app being removed from the App Store. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, similarly, said he can't guarantee that independent seller data is never accessed when making business decisions, giving credence to earlier accusations that the retail giant uses sales data from independent sellers on its marketplace to help the company develop competing products for its private labels.
• Although it's too early to say if the hearing will lead to any rule-changing or law-making, what's amply clear is that the tech players continue to control distribution of information and services, surveil competitors, and abuse their market power to create barriers to entry that make it difficult for upstarts to gain traction.
• In the end, it's the users wanting an online experience that's privacy-oriented, transparent and trustworthy, and not a black box that decides what's good for them, who end up getting a raw deal. If anything, this reliance on Big Tech has shown no signs of slowing down, with consumers left with no choice and little control over their personal information. Rather the battle between the tech giants is about exerting supremacy and playing on their terms. It's never been a level playing field.