Poker of aces in front of fifteen men without mercy

The four of them are worth more than the entire economy of Germany, the largest European power, and their companies dominate the world in fields as extensive as distribution, multi-communication, data search and storage and universal connection platforms. It is the aces poker called with the acronym GAFA, corresponding to the supposedly unbeatable titans that are Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. 

Its four top leaders, Sundar Pichai (Alphabet-Google), Tim Cook (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon), finally appeared before the fifteen members of the Antitrust Commission of the United States Congress to answer for their alleged monopolistic practices. An accusation which, if proven true, would lead to legislative initiatives aimed at breaking these monopolies and depriving these technological giants of at least a part of their immense and incontestable power. 

This Committee has been investigating the practices of the GAFA in depth for more than a year, and numerous witnesses have passed by its stand, pointing out that they are the architects of, for example, having ruined proximity commerce (Amazon-Bezos); of having established a strategy of total absorption with Whatsapp and Instagram (Facebook-Zuckerberg); of having destroyed video competition through the YouTube platform (Google-Pichai), or of having become a digital giant capable of crushing its competitors (Apple-Cook). 

There was no room for an overall picture, as the limitations due to the pandemic meant that the hearing had to be by video conference, but the successive interrogations of the fifteen members of the Commission to the four super leaders of these companies revealed the fears of the Members of Parliament about the formidable accumulation of power obtained by these so-called "Big Tech" giants. Suffice it to say that the Chairman of the Commission, the Democrat David Cicilline, did not cut a hair in his introductory speech, accusing the four giants of having gained too much power', before listing the exorbitant turnover of each of them, alluding furthermore to the fact that if their alleged monopolistic practices were not curbed there is a certain risk that they will emerge from the pandemic even stronger and more powerful'. He could have, but did not, allude to the fact that Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has almost doubled his fortune during the pandemic. 

The session was particularly important not only for the United States but also for Europe, where the European Commission and Parliament are eagerly seeking ways of forcing the technological giants to contribute, in the form of proportionate taxation, to the burdens borne by the countries in which they derive their immense profits. 

In the case of Bezos, the Commission investigates whether Amazon has used the data of other vendors to launch competing products on the market, which would have made it a large monopoly, combining its role as a distribution platform at the same time as a manufacturer of competing products with the same customers whose goods it distributes. 

As for Alphabet, Google's parent company, the committee seems to have gathered evidence that would prove the use of its search engine as well as its Android mobile context to favour its services, such as the Google Shopping comparator or the Google Chrome browser. 

The president of Apple, Tim Cook, could be guillotined by the 'antitrust' laws, regarding the App Store and iOS, the application store and operating system that equips the iPhone, respectively. Besides investigating him for shamelessly favoring his services, such as Apple Music or Safari, he is also accused of imposing his payment system, with very high commissions, on platforms like Spotify or Netflix. 

And, finally, with respect to Facebook, its co-inventor and head, Mark Zuckerberg, is the only one of the four who already had experience in this type of appearance. It was in 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out, thanks to whose access to Facebook profiles Donald Trump was able to beat Hillary Clinton in those key districts, which helped her to win the final victory despite having three million votes less than her Democratic rival. Against accusations that Facebook had become a monopoly after the acquisition of its subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram, Zuckerberg defended himself by claiming that if he did not act, he would be crushed by the digital giants of authoritarian China, citing the case of TikTok.

The Commission will now deliberate before drawing its conclusions, which are likely to force the four components of the FATF to be broken up in order to avoid their colossal monopoly. All, moreover, enjoy the hostility of President Donald Trump, who before the hearings had encouraged on Twitter to crack down on the four. Once again, he used his usual threatening language: "If Congress doesn't do justice, I'll do it myself with executive orders. With less than a hundred days to go before the presidential election, Trump believes that these supposedly large technology monopolies, allied with their Democratic Party rivals, have conspired to drive him out of the White House.