Amazon
Every one of the House’s proposed
bills seems applicable to Amazon
in one way or another, but foremost among them is the Ending
Platform Monopolies Act, which
would allow the FTC to break up
tech giants if it decides the giants’
products and services could compete with those sold by other companies on the giants’ platforms.
If that seems to encompass
many things these platforms do
that we take for granted—from offering pre-installed apps on the
iPhone to offering house brands
like Kindle and Amazon Basics on
Amazon.com—that’s because the
language of the bill really is broad.
Past ideas from antitrust specialists for breaking up Amazon
have included splitting it into at
least four different companies by
separating the pillars of its dominance: the core retail operation, its
marketplace where third parties
can sell, its hugely profitable
cloud-services division, and its fulfillment and logistics operations.
Even if a split were limited to
spinning off its marketplace, the
change could be noticeable for
consumers. Amazon said last
month that the bills might lead to
it removing outside sellers—which
account for a majority of the items
sold on its platform. It would be as
if Amazon were broken into a retail division that functions like
Walmart—with its house brands
and the items from other companies that it sells directly—and a
separate marketplace like eBay.
It’s difficult to assess the potential impact of such a breakup and
foolhardy to profess certainty
about it—America has seen little
like it since the breakup of Ma
Bell. Amazon says it would mean
the end of things like free shipping, but the company’s own programs to allow outside vendors to
accomplish the exact same Prime
free delivery service, without the
aid of Amazon’s logistics operations, suggest the company could
find a way to maintain its operations regardless.
Apple
Another proposed bill, the American Choice and Innovation Online
Act, has a similar goal. It is intended to keep companies that
own big, market-dominating platAs momentum
builds to curtail the
power of Big Tech,
lawmakers, Beltway
pundits and the companies themselves
are all competing to
explain to the public what it might
mean to us, the everyday consumers of goods and services from
those in the crosshairs.
Will my iPhone really become
less secure, as Apple has claimed?
Would the selection we’ve grown
accustomed to on Amazon shrink,
as the company has intimated?
Would Facebook being forced to
sell off Instagram and WhatsApp
break those services, as Facebook
would have us believe? And would
the quality of Google search be degraded by its inability to feature
its own services, such as Google
Maps and YouTube videos, in results? Or, as the companies’ critics
would have it, will life be better
for users, competitors and society
if all those things come to pass?
Those questions gained new significance last month when the
House Judiciary Committee, with
bipartisan support, approved a
half-dozen bills that signaled fresh
willingness to break up the Faaam,
as I like to call the tech-titan quintet. (Microsoft, so far, has largely
avoided the crosshairs.)
Given the torturous process of
federal lawmaking, the chances of
these bills becoming law in their
present form aren’t high, and any
movement could be slow. Congress
is preoccupied with other battles
at the moment. The companies,
their lobbyists, and allies are already pushing back forcefully
against this legislation, and
against the new head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan,
who has criticized tech giants. A
federal judge’s decision this past
week dismissing antitrust lawsuits
against Facebook for being
“legally insufficient” suggests that
implementing stricter rules won’t
be easy.
But the chances are clearly rising that something like the provisions in these bills could become
the rules by which Big Tech must
abide—through an act of Congress,
laws at the state level, court battles, a new crop of regulators like
Ms. Khan or bipartisan political
will to move against tech.
Mr. Bezos plans to spend time on climate-focused efforts; last year he created a $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund.
Jeff Bezos’
Post-CEO
Checklist
sor, Amazon Web Services Chief
Executive Andy Jassy. Mr. Bezos,
the world’s richest person, has
been gradually moving to an expansive post-CEO life that aside
from space exploration includes a
climate-focused philanthropy and
an embrace of celebrity, complete
with public appearances with actors and moguls, multimillion-dollar homes, globe-trotting on private jets and a soon-to-becompleted superyacht.
The 57-year-old Amazon founder
has prepared closely for his departure and is handing the company’s
top post to one of his most trusted
advisers in Mr. Jassy, even as he
has signaled to investors that he
intends to remain involved. Mr. Bezos has said in his role as chairman he will focus on new initiatives and innovations, including on
projects to make Amazon’s warehouses safer for workers.
“You don’t want an organization to incur a knowledge gap,”
said Colin Bryar, who served as an
early technical adviser to Mr. Bezos. Mr. Bezos, he said, has noted
that executive transitions should
be “boring.”
Amazon declined to make Mr.
Bezos available for an interview.
These days, one of the best ways
to know what Mr. Bezos is up to, or
his whereabouts, is his Instagram
account. One of his latest posts
shows him embracing movie star
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson while
teasing a partnership between Amazon Studios and Mr. Johnson’s
Seven Bucks Productions company.
Several recent posts have been
about a newer interest—fighting
climate change. Mr. Bezos last year
announced the creation of the $10
billion Bezos Earth Fund, one of the
Continued from page B1
SIUNG TJIA/WSJ; TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS (BEZOS)
forms from giving their own services and wares sold on such platforms an artificial boost against
competitors. That could put a target on Apple’s App Store, through
which Apple controls 100% of the
market for apps for the iPhone. It’s
a lucrative market. One expert witness for Epic Games, Apple’s opponent in a recent court case, estimated the App Store’s operating
margins have been as high as 80%.
Apple disputes that its margins
on its own app store are that high,
but has declined to offer its own
figure. Apple’s mobile operating
system is used on six of every 10
mobile devices in the U.S.
In a letter to Congress and a paper on security, Apple has framed
attacks on its monopoly on distribution of apps on these devices as
attacks on its ability to keep them
secure.
The potential impact could be
broader—both for Apple and its
customers, by prying apart the
hugely profitable “walled garden”
of hardware, software and services
that make its products relatively
seamless for users but also constrains their choices.
New rules and regulators could
compel Apple to break up that system, by divesting its own App
store or letting users load apps
from anyplace they like. That could
mean easier access for iPhone users to other companies’ products—
as well as the freedom to expose
themselves to threats of ransomware or digital identity theft.
Facebook
The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, a third bill, is designed to more or less ban what
has been a signature move for
Facebook: acquiring a competitor
before it can become a threat.
The FTC lawsuit against Facebook that was among those dismissed this week accused the company of anticompetitive practices
in its acquisition of WhatsApp and
Instagram. If the new legislation
were to pass, it could make it
much easier for the FTC to win
such a case.
Facebook has said this would
make it harder for people to, for example, cross-post between Instagram and Facebook. On the other
hand, Facebook’s comprehensive
dossier on all of us, which it sells to
advertisers—albeit in increasingly
anonymized form—would be much
harder for the company to build.
A Facebook spokesman called
these bills “a poison pill for America’s tech industry at a time our
economy can least afford it.”
Alphabet (Google)
Google’s search empire—it controls 92% of the global search market—would also be affected by the
American Choice and Innovation
Online Act. The company says that
not being able to preference its
own services would mean they
would no longer appear atop its
search results.
In the short term, not seeing
Google Maps results on your
search results could be disruptive
for users, but there are plenty of
competitors that would be eager
to occupy the same slot.
“We are not opposed to antitrust scrutiny or updated regulations on specific issues,” says
Mark Isakowitz, vice president of
government affairs at Google. “But
American consumers and small
businesses would be shocked at
how these bills would break many
of their favorite services.”
It’s clear that any actions
against Big Tech will take a long
time yet to impact consumers. The
federal government’s case against
Microsoft, for example, spanned
three presidential administrations,
from 1991 to 2001. By the end, the
government settled rather than
continuing to pursue a breakup of
the company.
Even if such changes are far off,
users might need to prepare themselves for changes to these services. Those changes could lead to
more competition, and ultimately
innovation. But while we’re waiting
for Amazon’s disrupter to get us
toilet paper from, say, a network of
drones that deliver in 30 minutes
instead of a day, we might also
have to accept the way that topdown efforts to encourage competition can affect conveniences
we’ve come to take for granted