The order is the president’s latest acknowledgment of concerns that the tech giants have obtained outsize market power.
President Biden on Friday will encourage federal agencies to crack down on the way major tech companies grow through mergers and gain a competitive advantage by leveraging reams of consumer data, as part of a larger executive order aimed at dispersing corporate consolidation throughout the economy.
The executive order includes several measures specifically targeting big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, people with knowledge of its contents said.
The order will tell the federal agencies that approve mergers that they should scrutinize the tech industry’s practices more closely. A second provision will encourage the Federal Trade Commission to write rules limiting how the tech giants use consumer data, a response to criticism that companies like Amazon can leverage what they know about users to gain the upper hand on competing services and businesses.
The order is Mr. Biden’s latest acknowledgment of concerns that the tech giants have obtained outsize market power, becoming gatekeepers to commerce, communications and culture. A growing group of lawmakers, academics and rival companies say government regulators failed to check the growth of the companies for more than a decade. To address the companies’ market power, they say, policymakers need to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and possibly rewrite them to better capture Silicon Valley’s business models.
Mr. Biden has already put some vocal critics of Big Tech in leadership positions. In the White House, he appointed Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and outspoken proponent of breaking up companies like Facebook, as a special adviser on competition. He named Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan has also called for the breakup of big tech companies and worked on a House antitrust investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Big Tech’s critics also often argue that the economy on a whole has become more concentrated to the detriment of consumers — including in industries like agriculture, medicine and fashion. And some White House officials hope the order will hark back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who highlighted the rise of big business and installed government officials opposed to concentration, the people said.
But his administration is limited in its reach. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are independent agencies that enforce existing antitrust and communications laws. Those laws have barely changed since before the mass adoption of the internet.
