Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If I could come back to the topic of competition, antitrust and monopolies in the new marketplace, there's been a lot of discussion recently, particularly in the United States, about the new digital monopolies and the fact that they may be a lot more durable than monopolies in the past—the railroads, the phone companies and so forth. They can overwhelm competition by either buying it or destroying it.
Yesterday I quoted, to the Facebook representative who was before us, the writings of Chris Hughes, the disillusioned former co-founder of Facebook. I know there's been some suggestion from some of our panellists today that their companies may be willing to accept versions of the European legislation, but one of Mr. Hughes' headlines suggests that Facebook should, in fact, be broken up and be subject to antitrust application. He said, “Facebook isn't afraid of a few more rules. It's afraid of an antitrust case”.
I know the defence against antitrust prosecution is a little more difficult because your big data monopolies use the excuse that your service is free and that there's not a tangible or identifiable dollar cost to what consumers are buying.
Again, this question may be greater than your job descriptions allow, which is why we asked that CEOs be present with us today, but I wonder, particularly in the case of Amazon and Microsoft, if you could discuss your companies' views with regard to countering these growing antitrust discussions and calls for breakup in the interests of greater competition and greater consumer protection.
I'll start with Mr. Ryland.