The antitrust hearing at which Tim Cook and other tech CEOs are to testify has been delayed until 12pm (ET) Wednesday 29 July. It was originally set to take place today (Monday 27 July).
The delay is due to a clash with the memorial service for civil rights leader John Lewis who died last week.
Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all testify in the hearing at the US House of Representatives, which will seek to determine whether these tech giants are giving themselves an unfair advantage at the expense of smaller competitors, and whether this could be a disadvantage for consumers.
The hearing, entitled ‘Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple’, will be looking at the Apple App Store to see if it is fair that the company takes a cut from all sales there. We wrote about the Antitrust case here.
The CEOs will be appearing remotely via video conferencing due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, the EU is also looking into the App Store, Books Store and Apple Pay in an attempt to establish whether Apple is violating competition laws, following complaints from Spotify and others (more here).
On 10 July new EU guidance for a fairer online economy was published and a few days later a law was enacted that should help support developers who find their apps withdrawn from Apple and Google’s stores. The legislation “on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services” should mean that developers get at least 30 days notice before the termination.
This doesn’t mean that Apple and Google won’t be able to remove dangerous apps – there are provisions in the legislation against cybersecurity risks, malware and fraud, for example.
Via MACWORLD