Silicon Valley behemoths are in the crosshairs of global regulators not because they are among the largest and most profitable businesses on earth, but because they exploit the data we produce as part of the normal course of web browsing, app use and digital consumption as well as making sophisticated inferences about who we are, what we want and what we are likely to do.
SINGAPORE (July 15): On July 16, top executives from tech behemoths Facebook, Google’s owner Alphabet, Amazon.com and Apple will testify before the US House Committee on the Judiciary. The congressional hearing, part of a wide-ranging antitrust probe of the tech players that have a combined market capitalisation of US$3.3 trillion ($4.49 trillion), will cover their potential threat to competition and innovation as well as whether their continued dominance is harmful to consumers or business rivals.
The moment of truth for global tech giants is finally here. A decade after the end of the global financial crisis that suddenly catapulted high-growth tech companies with their blitzscaling business models to the forefront as the new drivers of the global economy, US regulators are cracking the whip. Will search giant Google, social media powerhouse Facebook and e-commerce pioneer Amazon be reined in? Will the intense scrutiny of their respective business models eventually lead to antitrust action against one or several of them? Will they be regulated? Are Facebook and Google in danger of being broken up?
