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Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney had some biting words on Friday for tech executives who are fawning over US president-elect Donald Trump, accusing them of playing nice to push anti-competitive policy to the detriment of the rest of us.
“After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration,” Sweeney said in a post on X. “Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.”
Google and Apple are among Trump’s new tech industry admirers: Both are donating $1 million to the inauguration, with Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly making the contribution personally. Sweeney and Epic have been battling both companies for years over smartphone software distribution.
The short version is that Sweeney wants to sell games on iPhones and Android phones without using Apple and Google’s official stores and payment processing systems—or paying a fee for the privilege—and has argued that the companies are unfairly monopolizing the mobile software market by making that very difficult to do. He’s made some progress in Europe, but the situation in the US hasn’t budged much. Last year, Sweeney vowed to “keep fighting on until there’s an ultimate victory” over Apple and Google’s “totally broken vision for the world.”
Although law firm Skadden predicts that “aggressive antitrust enforcement is unlikely to disappear altogether” during Trump’s second term, the new administration is expected to be softer on antitrust cases, and FTC Chair Lina Khan said this week that she hopes Amazon and Meta won’t be handed a “sweetheart deal” in upcoming antitrust trials.
Probably not coincidentally, Amazon and Meta have both made their own million-dollar Trump inauguration donations, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also loosening Facebook content moderation policies in an obvious attempt to please the new administration.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said recently that he’d love to personally congratulate Trump, and that the GPU maker will do everything it can “to help this administration succeed,” although Nvidia hasn’t announced plans to donate to the inauguration.
Trump himself has commented on the attitude change from big tech leaders. “The first term, everybody was fighting me,” the president-elect said in December. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
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Kurt Indovina
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