San Francisco (AFP)

The bosses of Alphabet (Google), Apple, Facebook and Amazon intend to appeal to the economic patriotism of elected officials during the hearing of the tech giants in Congress on Wednesday on possible anti-competitive practices.

Facebook is a "proudly American company", which would not have succeeded without "laws encouraging competition and innovation", for example will declare before elected officials Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, according to his opening speech filed Tuesday with the judicial commission.

The four leaders will have to defend their empires, accused both on the left and on the right of having become too dominant. All of them argue that their success could not have happened elsewhere than in the United States.

Mark Zuckerberg will use one of his favorite arguments to justify the size of his network - the need not to be overtaken by China.

"We believe in certain values ​​- democracy, competition, inclusion, freedom of expression - on which the American economy has been built," he asserts.

"There are no guarantees that our values ​​will win. China, for example, builds its own version of the internet on very different ideas, and exports this vision to other countries."

- All for America -

Sundar Pichai praises the significant investments of Google, which make it possible to "consolidate the position of America" ​​in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous cars or quantum computing.

“Just as American dominance in these areas is not inevitable, we know that Google's continued success is not guaranteed,” he warns.

Jeff Bezos expands in rave terms about his American dream, from his early immigrant father from Amazon in a garage, to the current group "which has created more jobs in the United States over the past decade than any other business".

He praises the confidence of consumers, and even the country in general, citing "independent polls" that "80% of Americans have an overall favorable impression of Amazon."

All four claim to face fierce competition.

"Apple is not dominant in any of the markets where we do business," points out Tim Cook, the boss of the iPhone manufacturer.

Apple and Amazon are accused of being judges and parties on their platforms, the App Store for one and the e-commerce site for the other, because their products there compete with those of competitors.

- Mirror, my beautiful mirror -

"Amazon accounts for only 1% of the 25,000 billion dollars of the global distribution market, and 4% in the United States", answers, in advance, Jeff Bezos.

The richest man in the world also adds that, far from crushing the competition, his success is closely linked to the success of the SMEs present on his platform and partly explains the proliferation of competing e-commerce sites, from Walmart to Etsy. .

Tim Cook argues for his part that the commissions taken by Apple from application editors are "comparable or inferior" to those of their rivals, and "significantly lower" than the distribution costs that these editors paid before the App Store.

The emblematic bosses all recognize the relevance of a review of their activities by elected officials.

Mark Zuckerberg goes so far as to recall that in his opinion governments and regulators should "play a more active role" to "update the rules of the Internet" in terms of moderation of content.

But Jeff Bezos, whose first hearing in Congress, however, warns parliamentarians about his philosophy: "If, when you look in the mirror, and you assess the critics, you still think that you made the right decisions, no force in the world should be able to make you change. "

© 2020 AFP