Cicilline said the investigation won’t target one specific tech company, but rather focus on the broad belief that the “Internet is broken,” he told reporters. Amazon and Apple also could figure into the committee’s early plans, he said, cautioning the goal is a broader look at the industry. His office said that tech companies, for all their innovations, had created “escalating crises,” from eroding Americans’ privacy rights to depriving ad revenue from cash-strapped local news outlets. Amazon, Apple and Facebook did not respond to requests for comment, and Google declined comment. Even when world regulators had sought to challenge these companies’ business practices — Europe has fined Google $9 billion in just the last three years, for example — Washington had remained a staunch ally of Facebook, Google and their peers.

Source: Washington Post June 03, 2019 21:00 UTC