Internet CEOs Claim Apple and Google Abuse Their Power
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A group of internet company CEOs is claiming that tech giants like Google and Apple are abusing their sheer power and scale, and have called on the European Union’s authorities to crack down on what they claim are troubling practices.
The CEOs of various European music streaming and internet companies — including Spotify, Deezer and Rocket — have penned and sent a letter to the European Commission claiming that large tech companies “can and do abuse their privileged position.” The letter goes on to state that “our collective experience is that where online platforms have a strong incentive to turn into gatekeepers because of their dual role, instead of maximizing consumer welfare,” the letter states. A full copy of the letter is available here, via Business Insider.
Notably, the letter did not mention any specific companies by name — but it did hint at corporations with mobile operating systems, app stores and search engines switching their roles from “gateways” into “gatekeepers,” according to the Financial Times. The chief complaint about this concentration of power that these massive corporations are “restricting access to data or interaction with consumers, biased ranking and search results to lack of clarity, imbalanced terms and conditions and preferences of their own vertically integrated services.”
Apple and Google together — with iOS and Android, respectively — make up about 90 percent of the mobile operating system market in Europe. Google alone dominates the search engine market in the region, as it does with huge swaths of the rest of the globe. So while the letter didn’t specifically call any one Silicon Valley tech giant out, it’s pretty clear which companies the group of CEOs have issues with.
The letter was sent to the European Union’s executive arm ahead of a policy called the Digital Single Market, which is aimed at setting harmonized rules and policies for the digital economy, according to CNBC. A review of the bill is scheduled for Wednesday, May 10.
