The antitrust hearing with bosses from big tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google which had been scheduled for Monday could be postponed according to sources familiar with the matter which was reported by CNBC that the date was in conflict with the memorial service of the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
The hearing which is set up by the House Judiciary Committee and the Antitrust Subcommittee is yet to confirm if the event will be postponed as pertaining to the report and spokespeople representing the hearing didn’t immediately comment on the matter when asked.
The Monday hearing is set to feature big tech CEOs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai which is meant to be the culmination of a more than a year-long investigation into the four big tech companies in their handling of user’s data and privacy.
Right after the hearing, American Lawmakers are supposed to issue reports based on their findings throughout the investigation as well as propose legislation that would aim to bring in the antitrust laws up to date to be responsive to issues unique to the digital marketplaces.
Meanwhile this had been continuously interrupted by the public health crisis which had interrupted the Congress’s normal sitting. In fact, the Subcommittee chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I said back in January that he was expecting the report to have been completed by early April but here we are in July and that isn’t yet the case.
It’s not yet clear when the hearing will be rescheduled.
A special ceremony is scheduled in honor of Lewis on Monday at 2 p.m. ET at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. After, he will lie in state at the Capitol. The antitrust hearing had been scheduled to begin at noon.
Also report has it that Twitter boss could be summoned to join the antitrust hearing over the compapny’s recent big time hack which saw the account of big profile users jeopardized by cyber attackers leading to some US$100,000 worth of Bitcoin being stolen as the hackers used the hijacked profiles to persuade to users to users to send them Bitcoin which will be returned to them in double folds.
