NYU professor and author Professor Scott Galloway has outlined seven antitrust questions Tim Cook may be asked when he appears before Congress on Wednesday.
Galloway has now written a blog post listing four key antitrust questions he thinks need to be put to all of the tech giants, with a further three for Apple specifically. The first four share a common theme: are the companies now so large that they make it almost impossible for smaller players to compete?
So, are these entities the Four Horsemen of god, love, sex, and consumption? Or are they the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse? The answer is yes to both questions. I’ll just call them the Four Horsemen.
How did these companies aggregate so much power? How can an inanimate, for-profit enterprise become so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it reshapes the rules of what a company can do and be? What does unprecedented scale and influence mean for the future of business and the global economy? Are they destined, like other business titans before them, to be eclipsed by younger, sexier rivals? Or have they become so entrenched that nobody-individual, enterprise, government, or otherwise-stands a chance?
And the three antitrust questions for Apple specifically:
Q: Your market capitalization per employee is thousands of times higher than that of other companies in your sectors. Do you think your companies contribute to income inequality?
Q: Since the onset of the pandemic, nearly every sector, other than big tech and companies deemed too big to fail, has shed substantial value. Instead, since the beginning of the year, your firms and Microsoft have increased in value by an average of 35%, while the remaining 495 firms in the S&P 500 are down 5%. Every firm, sector, and economy appears to have incurred a transfer in value and power to your firms. Should we be concerned that your considerable advantage pre-Covid is now unassailable?
Q: Small business formation is at a multi-decade low. The fastest-growing sectors receive scant funding from investors. Why should someone invest in a search engine right now, or a music streaming business, or a social media platform, or an e-commerce firm, given the sizes of your companies?
Galloway supports each question with illustrative graphics. You can see these – and the specific antitrust questions he wants to see put to the three other tech giants – in the blog post.
Q: Apple TV+ is offering consumers $1 billion in original content for every .80c a month the consumer spends on your Apple TV+ streaming video service. Isn’t it your opportunity to differentiate your $1,300 phones and fund Apple TV+ from the revenues of an unrelated product that allows you to offer a media product at well below cost? In sum, isn’t Apple guilty of “dumping,” that is, buying market share with unfeasibly low prices?
Q: Spotify is consistently rated as a superior music service to your Apple Music, yet Apple Music is growing faster than Spotify in the US. Isn’t this a function of you owning the rails, and being able to levy a 30% tax on a competitor while illegally reducing their discoverability in the app store?
The hearing was postponed last week when it turned out to clash with a memorial service for the acclaimed civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, and is now set to go ahead on July 29, starting at 12 noon ET. The coronavirus crisis means that Cook and the other CEOs will be allowed to give evidence via video link.
Photo: Bloomberg
