(Video Credit: Last Week Tonight)
“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver took direct aim at Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week, asserting that he may be standing in the way of antitrust legislation because his daughters work for Amazon and Meta.
The charge comes as two antitrust bills, the American Choice and Innovation Act (AICO) and the Open App Markets Act, are being held up in the Senate, preventing the hammer from being brought down on Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
“Our experiences on the Internet are now dominated by a small handful of companies who are getting pretty used to throwing their weight around,” Oliver said.
Schumer has one daughter named Jessica who is a registered lobbyist with Amazon. He has another daughter named Allison who works as a product marketing manager for Meta. Oliver sees that as an obvious conflict of interest for Schumer.
corruption at its finest
— Sososocialist (@holland_j0hn) June 13, 2022
The antitrust bills sitting in Congress would ostensibly limit a company’s ability to promote its own products and payment service tools over others. The legislation would limit the power of Big Tech companies and loosen their stranglehold on the market.
Schumer has contended that he will support the legislation but there is, asyet, no indication when a vote will take place. Oliver asserts that if the vote is not called for before August recess, it is essentially “dead” because Democrats stand to be “annihilated” in the midterms.
“If he doesn’t do it before Congress leaves for its August recess, the bills are probably dead because, in the fall, everyone’s going to have moved on to focus on the midterm elections where, we all know, the Democrats will be absolutely annihilated,” Oliver proclaimed.
The leftist comedian referred to a Politico piece that reported on 17 members of Congress having children that have either recently worked for or are still working for Big Tech companies.
Super cool to see my reporting cited in this John Oliver segment about the big tech antitrust legislation last night. Wild to watch these issues go mainstream. pic.twitter.com/RvS6d935lH
— Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e) June 13, 2022
“It doesn’t help that 17 members of Congress currently have children who work or have recently worked for four of the biggest tech companies, including crucially, Chuck Schumer’s daughters, one of whom works as a marketing manager at Meta and one of whom is a literal registered lobbyist for Amazon,” Oliver remarked.
Oliver is in favor of breaking up Big Tech companies and notes that monopolies are never a good thing. He insisted that action has to be taken now and that Schumer is delaying it. The host stated that only a handful of tech companies have a “monopoly” on the Internet and that has to change.
“Ending a monopoly is almost always a good thing, whether it’s AT&T, or Standard Oil, or literally any game of Monopoly,” Oliver quipped during his show Sunday. “When harmful monopolies end, innovation flourishes.”
Congress is in a position right now to address the worst of these issues with a bill that has a miraculous amount of bipartisan support.
As John Oliver points out, the biggest risk is actually that Democrat leadership (e.g. @SenSchumer) will deny it a vote.
— Holmes Wilson (@holmesworcester) June 13, 2022
“The problem with letting a few companies control whole sectors of our economy is that it limits what is possible by startups,” Oliver explained. “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 relished taking aim at the behemoths of the Internet, especially Amazon.
“Amazon basically is the marketplace,” Oliver declared. “It’s essentially the only place to sell anything on the Internet — unless, that is, you’re looking to offload some human teeth. Because then, it’s Craigslist all the way, baby.”
“These bills would crack the door open for innovation and budge the Internet back towards what it was supposed to be from the start,” he insisted.
John Oliver: “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 won’t get a fair chance to try. That is the problem, here.” #LastWeekTonight pic.twitter.com/pVq9Hse5lD
— Garin Pirnia (@gpirnia) June 13, 2022
Both bills in Congress enjoy bipartisan support. But Democrats appear to be the ones holding them up.
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