Big tech firmly opposes Senate antitrust bills citing user security

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Big tech is again facing the United States Senate and proposed antitrust bills it says could cause millions of Americans to see malware attacks. Both Apple and Google, which we will refer to as the big tech dynamic duo, have voiced concerns over the proposed Senate antitrust bills.

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In a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday, Apple (big tech dynamic duo 1) warned that the proposed bills would bring more security risks to iPhone users in the United States. The proposed bills could force Apple to allow sideloading of apps which they argue would put people at risk for malware.

″The bills put consumers in harm’s way because of the real risk of privacy and security breaches,” Apple’s senior director of government affairs, Timothy Powderly, wrote in a letter to the Senate Justice Committee viewed by CNBC.

Apple has drawn consistent scrutiny from regulators in the past few years over its control of the App Store, which is the only way to install software on an iPhone. Apple takes a cut of between 15% and 30% on digital purchases made through iPhone apps.

“But, if Apple is forced to enable sideloading, millions of Americans will likely suffer malware attacks on their phones that would otherwise have been stopped,” Powderly wrote in the letter.

CNBC

Google (big tech dynamic duo 2) also chimed in on the proposed antitrust bills with a blog post from its Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker.

In a blog post Tuesday, Google’s Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker similarly argued that the bills could make their products less secure by preventing Google from integrating automated security features or making it harder to detect security risks across products if forced to break the connections between them. He also said the bills could force Google to share sensitive data with other companies and that its app store and search engine “might have to give equal prominence to a raft of spammy and low-quality services.”

Walker also argued the bills would put American innovation at a disadvantage and ultimately hurt consumers and small businesses that use its services.

CNBC

You can read more over at CNBC if you want a greater scope of this story. For now, we’re not sure how Senators expect to regulate big tech when it is the very hand that feeds them.

What do you think about big tech and their ties to the senators proposing these bills? Please share your thoughts on any of the social media pages listed below. You can also comment on our MeWe page by joining the MeWe social network.

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