It was scheduled to take place from 11:00 p.m. on July 29 (Vietnam time), but the event was delayed more than an hour due to technical problems.

Opening the hearing, David Cicilline, Chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee – US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said that the investigation into the monopolistic practices of four companies, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, took place in

David Cicilline, Chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee, moderated the hearing.

`Before Covid-19, these companies were already ‘giants’ in our economy. During the pandemic, they are even bigger than ever,` he said.

`Simply put, they have too much power,` Cicilline concluded.

Jerry Nadler, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, compared today’s technology corporations to the railroad monopoly more than a century ago, when dominant companies could choose prices, squeezing out competitors.

Due to travel restrictions during the pandemic, all four CEOs chose to answer questions online.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.

Asked to speak first, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, shared about his turbulent childhood because Jackie was pregnant and gave birth to him when she was a 17-year-old high school student.

Starting out as a modest online book store, Jeff Bezos admitted that Amazon has grown into a major e-commerce company.

After this speech, House members did not `touch` Bezos for nearly 90 minutes, allowing him to leisurely eat cake and drink water while other CEOs were continuously questioned.

Like Bezos, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, also announced that they face fierce competition in the smartphone market with big competitors like Samsung, Huawei, and Google.

`Our goal is ‘the best’, not ‘the most’. We don’t have a dominant market share in any market or in any product segment,` he said.

However, the problem is that the investigators did not consider smartphone market share, but focused on complaints from developers that Apple imposed harsh regulations, including having to pay fees of up to 15-30

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, speaks online.

Similarly, in a five-minute speech, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, described the `tough competition` his company faces.

He also said that the decision to spend $19 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014 was just a solution to help the company compete with telecommunications companies, which charge users for each message.

Responding to the question of whether Instagram should be separated from Facebook, Zuckerberg said that there is no guarantee that this application will achieve success with more than a billion monthly users like today if they do not spend a billion USD to acquire it in 2012.

Meanwhile, in the foreword, Google CEO Sundar Pichai affirmed that the company has created a competitive platform with lower prices for advertisers.

Senator Cicilline said the Committee collected internal emails of Google employees and conducted interviews with smaller businesses.

Pichai did not directly deny the accusations and explained they `try to understand trends based on data and exploit it to improve products for users`.

Chau An