HBO’s John Oliver Slams Google’s, Amazon’s Anticompetitive Practices

Comedian and late night host John Oliver slammed Amazon’s and Google’s antitrust practices on his show and urged antitrust reform.

HBO’s Last Week Tonight host John Oliver took aim at Google’s and Amazon’s anticompetitive practices on June 12, according to The Verge. Oliver noted that “experiences on the internet are now dominated by a very small handful of companies, who are getting pretty used to throwing their weight around.” 

Oliver cited the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee’s 2020 investigation of competition in digital markets, which probed Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. “A big thing these companies are accused of doing is suppressing their competition so completely, that we never actually know if someone else could do it better, because they’ll never get a fair chance to try,” he said. “That is the problem here. It’s not that tech companies are inherently bad because they are big, it’s that they’re engaging in anti-competitive behavior.”

Oliver stated how controlling Big Tech can sometimes be. “The problem with letting a few companies control whole sectors of our economy is that it limits what is possible by startups,” Oliver stated, according to The Verge. “An innovative app or website or startup may never get off the ground because it could be surcharged to death, buried in search results or ripped off completely.”

He pointed out that the original purpose of the internet was to open up information. “These bills would crack the door open for innovation and budge the internet back towards what it was supposed to be from the start,” Oliver said.

Oliver specifically mentioned the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO), and Open App Markets Acts, which were both authored by Oliver. The Verge. 

Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a pro-censorship Senator, introduced the bipartisan AICO. The bill’s language would protect smaller platforms by preventing major tech platforms from favoring their own products and discriminating against competing products. But one caveat of this bill is that it would authorize President Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the Democrat-majority Federal Trade Commission to designate companies covered by the regulations and to enforce the legislation.

Both bills aim to prevent Big Tech platforms from prioritizing their own services and from requiring software developers to sell apps exclusively on those major platforms’ app stores. 

Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.NY), whose daughters work at Amazon and Facebook has yet to act to bring the antitrust bills up to a vote.

Oliver raised concerns about free speech in relation to the two bills he mentioned. AICO was supported by the leftist Tech Oversight Project which is funded from Pierre Omidyar (leftist billionaire). 

An apparent loophole in the Open App Markets Act for “covered” companies seems to allow biased censorship. The Democratic National Committee also recently released “Recommendations for Combating Online Misinformation,” which explicitly supported censorship.

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