The House Judiciary Committee released a large number of business documents on July 29, 2020 alongside the Antitrust Subcommittee’s hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power.” The five-and-a-half-hour hearing featured Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sudhar Pichai of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. The business documents are a subset of the documents collected as part of an ongoing House Committee antitrust investigation.
TPI Senior Fellow Sarah Oh summarizes and analyzes these documents in a new paper, Is There Evidence of Antitrust Harm in the House Judiciary Committee’s Hot Docs? “Dr. Oh concludes that these “hot docs,” particularly combined with market evidence, reveal episodes of rapid growth and innovation in digital markets, as opposed to obvious instances of anticompetitive conduct. This deep dive into the business documents shows that far more fact-finding pertaining to economic conduct along with definitions of relevant markets will be needed in any antitrust investigations of these business deals.
Read the analysis here.
Contact: Lindsay Poss, [email protected]
The Technology Policy Institute
The Technology Policy Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization that focuses on the economics of innovation, technological change, and related regulation in the United States and around the world. More information is available at http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/.
