Navarro rips Google, Amazon, Apple: Parler attack ‘chilling’
'What we have here is a classic collusive oligopoly'
Big Tech banning alternative social media platform Parler was “chilling,” White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Director Peter Navarro said on Thursday.
“What we have here is a classic collusive oligopoly, a kind of new wine in an old bottle,” Navarro told FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo on "Mornings with Maria."
“What we saw with this attack on Parler was chilling to me. It’s one thing to deplatform everybody for free speech. But, this was a pincer move where Google and Apple, [the] first part of the pincer, was to not allow Parler apps to be down."
Navarro said Amazon came in for the "brutal kill by taking the cloud away as a small company" because it was no longer able to access its data.
"Effectively, Amazon wiped out that company," he said.
Navarro believes Parler has a "heck of a lawsuit for damages" and Congress needs to look "very carefully at this collusion because there is serious trust issues.”
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Parler on Monday filed a lawsuit against Amazon following Amazon Web Services' (AWS) decision to suspend it from its cloud hosting service following last week's deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Parler is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep AWS from blackballing it and claims AWS is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in the filing.
The suit comes as Google and Apple have also taken action against Parler in the wake of a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, suspending it from their app store Friday due to a failure to moderate "egregious content" posted by users related to the violent siege last week.
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Navarro noted that though the former Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was "allowed" to tweet and the "China Communist Party official propaganda organs put things up [on Twitter] all the time," President Trump had been removed.
“The Twitter censors don’t jump up there and say ‘this is disputed.’ So what is going on here, I think, is a very serious threat to our democracy," he said.
FOX Business' Evie Fordham contributed to this report.