Tile, a startup that makes location-aware tracking tags, will testify against Apple in a congressional antitrust hearing today.
According to a new report from Reuters, the company will be present at a House antitrust subcommittee hearing today in Boulder, Colorado, where it, along with three other companies, will detail how Google, Amazon, and Apple have smothered their growth.
“After thoughtful consideration and months of bringing our concerns to Apple through regular … channels, Tile has made the decision to continue raising concerns over Apple’s anti-competitive practices,” Tile general counsel Kirsten Daru told Reuters in an interview.
Apple for year sold Tile products in its retail locations, but no more. The iPhone maker is said to be getting ready to release a competitor to Tile – likely called AirTags – and it has even poached a Tile engineer to help.
Apple rebuked Tile’s claims, saying that the latter hasn’t built a business model around knowing a customers location or the location of their device and that users have control of such data and they can choose which location services they want enabled or disabled.
Tile is just one of four companies testifying at the ongoing hearing of the House Judiciary Committee although it isn’t clear whether they will all be pointing the finger squarely at Apple.
One of executives speaking at Friday’s hearing, PopSockets founder David Barnett, will air his complaints about how the practices of tech’s biggest companies are stifling smaller firms.
“Amazon has gotten used to dictating the terms of its partnerships because it can and most of its young partners are unable to survive if they say, ‘I’m not happy with these terms so I’m going to go elsewhere.’ There’s nowhere for them to go,” said Barnett in a statement.
In September 2019, lawmakers asked more than 80 companies to advise them on ways they have been harmed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. Spotify previously spoke out against Apple’s business practices.
