From Roll Call: House Democrats back antitrust overhaul of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple

For this week's written assignment.

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Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee said Tuesday that Congress should consider forcing Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook, some of the country’s largest and most successful technology companies, to separate key sections of their business empires to reduce alleged market dominance.

A staff report and recommendations released by the committee’s majority — led by Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., who chairs the antitrust subcommittee — said all four companies maintain monopolies in their unique markets: Amazon in its third-party seller market, Google in online search and advertising, Apple in software distribution on mobile devices and Facebook in social networking.

“By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy,” Nadler wrote in a foreword to the report. “They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them.

“Companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons,” Nadler wrote.

In addition to the prospect of forcing the companies to separate their businesses to prohibit them from exerting their market dominance in competition with “firms dependent on [their] infrastructure,” the report said Congress should limit the markets in which the companies could do business.