Washington’s one-two antitrust punch is about to smack Big Tech

Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have made hundreds of acquisitions over the last decade, none of which were stopped by antitrust enforcers. — AFP

US Attorney General William Barr and Representative David Cicilline are far from ideological soulmates. But in a one-two punch, they’re about to take on the country’s biggest technology platforms and could drive the most significant changes to antitrust law enforcement in decades.

Barr, one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal cabinet members, is poised to file a monopoly-abuse lawsuit as soon as this week against Alphabet Inc’s Google. Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, is preparing legislation based on last week’s report alleging wide-ranging antitrust violations by Google, Facebook Inc, Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc.