On Thursday, Donald Trump announced to Bloomberg that Amazon, Facebook, and Google may have a monopoly and that these companies are all involved in what he called “a very antitrust situation.”
After asserting that Google has a most definite liberal bias, Trump threw Amazon and Facebook into the discussion as well and explained that he believes most people would agree with his feeling that all three of these companies are involved in antitrust activities, as Business Insider has reported.
“As you know, many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them.”
With antitrust laws in place to make certain that companies don’t become too large and place a stranglehold on competition, Donald Trump could certainly move to enforce antitrust laws with these companies. However, Trump did not say that he would be moving to take any action immediately with Google, Amazon or Facebook and stated that at the moment he has no further comment about the current situation.
“I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s that or Amazon or Facebook.”
Earlier on Wednesday Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s previous White House chief strategist, remarked to CNN that he feels that tech companies like Google should be dismantled and broken up, according to Business Insider .
Trump says Google, Amazon, and Facebook may be ‘very antitrust,’ but stops short of calling for a breakup of the firms https://t.co/xLsxH1XYNy
— Insider Business (@BusinessInsider) August 31, 2018
With Bannon calling these companies “evil,” and noting that there is “no doubt about that,” he then launched into an attack specifically on Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and said that these individuals are true “narcissists and sociopaths,” and that “these people ought to be controlled, they ought to be regulated.” After this, he insisted that Google, Facebook, and Amazon should all be broken up.
If Donald Trump were to seriously consider taking action with antitrust laws against Facebook, Google, and Amazon, then either the FTC or the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division would be called upon to decide whether they should be taking up proceedings against these three companies.
Trump has previously stressed that Amazon is a “no-tax monopoly” that uses the U.S. Postal Service to its advantage, and a website called Axios has said that the president is reportedly “obsessed” with the company.
Of course, part of the reason that Donald Trump has voiced his displeasure with Google is because in his opinion, “Conservatives have been treated very unfairly.”
“I tell you there are some moments where we say, ‘Wow that really is bad, what they’re doing.’”
With Donald Trump putting Amazon, Facebook, and Google in the spotlight with regard to antitrust laws, it is fully possible that action may be taken in the future against these companies.
