Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are expected to send executives to Capitol Hill to testify next week during a congressional hearing announced Tuesday.
Hosted by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust issues, the July 16 hearing is scheduled to be the second held by the panel in nearly a month on the topic of “online platforms and market power.”
The hearing will be dedicated to discussing “innovation and entrepreneurship” and is slated to involve representatives for some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies.
Among the witnesses scheduled to testify are Adam Cohen, Google’s economic policy director; Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel; Matt Perault, Facebook’s head of global policy development; and Kyle Andeer, Apple’s chief compliance officer.
Other witnesses slated to appear include professors from Columbia and Yale, in addition to Stacy Mitchell, the head of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit organization, and Maureen Ohlhausen, a former member and acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
The subcommittee is chaired by Rep. David N. Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat leading a bipartisan antitrust investigation of the country’s largest tech companies.
“These are huge monopolies and we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make markets work,” Mr. Cicilline told CNBC following the subcommittee’s first hearing on the issue last month. “These are markets that are not working properly. We’re in this very serious monopoly moment.”
Mr. Cicilline previously called the probe “the first significant antitrust investigation undertaken by Congress in decades.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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