The main conclusion that we came with from the congressional hearing, which was prepared to interrogate Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018, was that those who decided to question Zuckerberg seemed to be ignorant of much about the nature of Facebook's business, and of online communication in general, In fact, it showed that it was more like a generational struggle, those coming from the world of videos and paper messages, against the younger generations in the contemporary world, users of Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

But this, in fact, was a wrong picture about it. The US Congressmen have raised very important questions about the nature of privacy in the digital world, how to trade with it, and how data is used as a weapon in general, but they just did not know how these questions could be phrased in a digital language. . This is a matter that matters to you as much as you care about getting your livelihood, whether you are already responsible for spending on yourself or your family, or in the future if you are a student now, because both things - if you ponder a little - are the same.

This time it was different, congressmen came ready for the new battle, they were loaded with tons of data that resulted from a whole year of research and investigation and hundreds of hours of interviews with more than a million documents, we are talking here about the recent Congressional hearing of the heads of four of the most important companies of the digital world. Contemporary, Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Google (Sundar Bachai), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) and Apple (Tim Cook), which were held on the twenty-ninth of July last for about six hours.

President of Amazon (Jeff Bezos), President of Google (Sander Bachai), President of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) and Apple President (Tim Cook) listen during the US House Judiciary Subcommittee session on antitrust and commercial and administrative law on "online platforms" (Reuters)

This time, the hearing focused on the increases in the fortunes of these four during the emerging Corona crisis, for example, the wealth of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, had increased during the past months by nearly $ 64 billion, and Zuckerberg's fortune rose by nearly $ 9 billion, and it was A controversial report issued by the Institute for Political Studies indicated that the wealth of billionaires in the United States of America has increased, in total, by nearly $ 300 billion, while poverty threatens tens of millions during the same crisis.

Although the four companies differ in the nature of the services they provide, they have common characteristics together. The accusations facing these four companies relate to their ability to exert strong pressure on their competitors to forcibly abandon their companies. On the other hand, the ability of these companies to collect a huge amount of The data on the small merchants on their platforms allows for unfair competition with these merchants.

To understand that idea, let's start with the Amazon company, as an investigation issued by The Wall Street Journal last April indicated that some of the company's sales managers use customer data, from small merchants, not citizens, to support products produced by Amazon. And compete with them, to understand that idea, let's assume that there is - in a town - a large merchant and another small, competing together in the sale of household items, but the big merchant has a way through which he knows all the information about the small merchant, what he sells, and the nature of the public who buys And his place of residence or work, and the volume of annual sales, how might this affect the competition between them?

Amazon has the ability to do so, as it is not just an intermediary between hundreds of thousands of sellers and millions of customers, but it is also a seller of such sellers. If a sales manager monitors customers ’attention to a product offered by a small company, he can easily provide similar products. In the market itself, and with time, merchants lose their marketing secrets, and Amazon controls everything and becomes - literally - the market, not just the middleman.

Mainly, the congressional attacks focused on that point, to which Bezos began hesitating to respond, and went deeper after the questioners dig behind the matter after summoning testimonials from sellers who said that Amazon deliberately prevented them from selling entire categories of books because it controls those categories as a merchant. On the other hand, Amazon - the company that controls three quarters of the e-commerce market - does not leave sellers with an opportunity but to sell through it, so you - as a small seller - will inevitably fall into the "grip" of Amazon in one way or another.

Google, on the other hand, has not escaped the accusation itself. If you want to search for something on the Internet, you must know that Google manages three processes here and not one process, as it manages the market for online searches, and the search results presented to you are mixed. With advertisements, for example, if you decide to search for "Zanussi customer service", which is a problem in Egypt because there are many companies claiming to be "original Zanussi", Google will give you the closest answers not only based on originality but ads, and so it may Your first contact is with a non-original company.

On the third side, Google, like Amazon, is entering a competitor for small companies in some areas, which gives them the ability to control this market because it is - simply - the search engine that 90% of the public goes to. The questioners at the hearing raised that point more than Once: What is stopping Google from limiting a site's reach to the public? Is Google using its massive data to identify threats to competitors and then work to eliminate them?

And Google had already faced, several years ago, accusations that it directs search audiences for its services, and in the meantime, it caused severe damage to platforms such as Yelp and Microsoft and its search engine, Bing. And travel sites such as "TripAdvisor" and "Expedia", and even the matter developed into accusations by the company that it was copying, without legal right, content from "Yelp", "Trip Advisor" and "Amazon" to improve its services, I attended These accusations are clear in the Congress session, and the company was accused directly of threatening "Yelp" in a way: Either you let us copy your content or remove you from the search list, or we may put you in the darkness of the third or fourth page of the search, the one that only aliens see!

Apple also faced similar accusations, although it does not have a huge market value like its predecessors, the congressional investigation was related - at the same pace - to the strength of the company, and the possibility of using that power to impose control over application developers who offer their applications in the Apple market, especially as it forces them to Receiving subscriptions for their applications through the Apple market and they cannot receive their money through any other means, which gives Apple the power to impose any percentage it may need from this seller, otherwise it may expel him outside it.

In fact, Apple, over the past ten years, has been facing issues from its customers accusing them of monopoly because you can not, through any means, download applications to your phone except through the Apple market, which demands developers a percentage of the profits, this percentage is added to the application price It makes it more expensive than it suits him in value.

On the other hand, Apple falls into the same problem, as it develops its own applications that compete with the applications of small developers, and thus it can easily prevent them from appearing in front of the public, or at least it can work to reduce their appearance rates, and it can even - like Google - that They copy successful ideas from small developers and present them in their own applications, based on a large amount of data it collects about these small developers, which also puts them in a position similar to Amazon.

On the same line, Facebook faced charges of monopoly because, like the previous group, it pressured its competitors to give up their companies and sell them to Facebook. One of the most famous examples here is the Facebook and Instagram problem (the Snapchat problem as well), where Facebook activated the "Facebook camera" feature. "To pressure Instagram to accept the deal, and the idea is simply to be in indirect threat. If you are a small company that provides a service and looks promising, the ploy of a large company to buy you begins with providing a similar service so that you know that if you reject the deal, the big company will remove you anyway and promote special services. Out. Again, this leaves no choice for small traders, developers or entrepreneurs.

On the other hand, the accusations linking Facebook data with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, of course, were raised in this interrogation, as the user data on Facebook was used by Cambridge Analytica to make a massive personality analysis that was used in turn to explore the characters who carry a nationalist or racial tendency and then were raised. Accounts that possess these personal qualities, through false and offensive accounts, have more racist and right-wing behaviors, which prompted Donald Trump's success in the elections because one of his most important tools was those trends.

But despite the questioning touched on other areas related to Russia, China and Trump, its main goal remains to inquire about the interests of millions of merchants, developers and small entrepreneurs who are under the control of these gigantic companies. The idea is not only about what these companies are doing now, which is still a matter of debate from the point of view. Political and judicial viewpoint, but rather of their capabilities, as there is nothing preventing them from exercising power over others in this market, David Cecilin, head of the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Judicial Committee of the US House of Representatives, summarizes this idea in his opening speech when he said: "In short, they have Too much power, this force undermines new competitors, and inhibits creativity and innovation. "

What is noticeable in the responses of this quartet of the emperors of electronic labor markets around the world is two points, the first is that you cannot extract specific information from their responses, and this is of course expected, as each of them may be equipped with a huge number of previous legal advice about what can be counted against them from Words they say in this session, and therefore the pattern of the conversation will always be general and accept interpretation in more than one way, and if the noose is narrowed, he will respond that he "does not know" or that he "will return to you after making sure about this matter." The second point is their insistence on constantly referring to the highly competitive nature of the market, which is indeed true, but which also can justify all monopolistic actions towards smaller competitors.

In any case, what happened is not the first step, nor is it the last step in a really big tracking process about these companies. We are facing one of the largest investigations in the history of the United States of America and the whole world, which of course will affect all countries of the world right up to your doorstep. Because you are - in one way or another - linked to one of these companies, or one of these billionaires, in your livelihood.

On the other hand, the matter extends to what is deeper than that, as we know that the state has always been the main agent of information, it is the collector, the controller and the main producer of it through its own internal and external networks, and because of that, it has always been the only entity capable of taking decisions that are accompanied by political changes. And social, but now there are other agents of information other than the state, and we are talking about those companies that collect massive data about people.

Consequently, these huge entities can also interfere in the political and social decision-making process in a way that may be more powerful than the state itself, and thus the centralization of the state is affected. You can know that among the 100 largest economies in the world there are only 49 countries, the rest are companies!

________________________________________________

Sources

  • WATCH: Biggest Tech Billionaires testify before Congress (Full Hearing)