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.” 2 The hearing featured the chief executive officers of four large U.S. technology companies. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sudhar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Tim Cook of Apple gave testimony and answered questions on a range of topics over five and a half hours. The business documents are a subset of the documents collected from an ongoing antitrust investigation by the House Committee. We read the files and analyze them below. In my assessment, 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.
Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.
