Rohit Chopra, a Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), on Friday testified before a House panel that he is concerned the U.S. government is “too often captured” by the country’s largest tech companies.<\/p>\n
Chopra made the comments during a hearing about data privacy before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, which has been investigating whether the top technology firms wield their power in the marketplace.<\/p>\n
“All too often, the government is too captured by those incumbents that use their power to dictate their preferred policies,” Chopra said, discussing his concerns around the unprecedented power and strength of Big Tech. He did not name any specific agency or company.<\/p>\n
Chopra, a Democratic official who formerly helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in recent months has aggressively dissented to the FTC’s record-breaking settlements with large tech companies including Facebook and Google’s YouTube, claiming the agency is not using the full breadth of its authority to take on some of the most powerful companies in the world.<\/p>\n
At the hearing, Chopra said he’s concerned that the massive troves of data held by companies like Amazon and Facebook allow them to elbow out smaller players, harming competition and stinging small businesses.<\/p>\n
“Under-enforcement [of antitrust] can really kill innovation and kill entry because when it\u2019s harder and harder to break in, that\u2019s just bad for small business and it\u2019s bad for all of us,” he told lawmakers.<\/p>\n
After the hearing, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the panel, told reporters that he shares Chopra’s “serious” concerns about the influence of tech companies over the regulatory and legislative process.<\/p>\n
“I think there\u2019s great concern that the large technology companies have a disproportionate influence over the regulatory process,” he said. “When you have these tremendous concentrations of economic power, it\u2019s followed by tremendous concentrations of political power.”<\/p>\n
“I think that\u2019s something that we should look at,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rohit Chopra, a Democrat on the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-tech","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19575,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19574\/revisions\/19575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}