House Lawmakers Considering Bills Meant to Undo Big Tech’s Dominance

Wednesday’s session is expected to continue for the whole day, potentially stretching into early Thursday.

The bills, which were introduced this month, reflect a growing concern about the power of the largest tech companies. The proposals have drawn support from members of both parties, uniting Democrats concerned about out-of-control businesses with Republicans who fear the power of online platforms to police content online.

“The digital marketplace suffers from a lack of competition,” said Representative David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and chairman of the subcommittee focused on antitrust. “Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are gatekeepers to the online economy.”

The proposals also have their share of critics.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, said in a Fox News opinion column on Tuesday that if “you think Big Tech is bad now, just wait until Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are working in collusion with Big Government.” Some California Democrats have also grown concerned that the bills would slow the state’s economic engine.

The tech giants have mounted an aggressive campaign to block the bills. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has been calling members of Congress to express his concerns. Executives at other companies have made statements in recent days opposing the bills. And scores of groups funded by the companies have urged lawmakers to oppose the proposals.

Mr. McAfee was also at the center of a media frenzy in 2012 surrounding the death in Belize of a neighbor. He fled his home there after the police called him a “person of interest.”

McAfee, the software company that he founded, was once a household name in computer security. But it rose to prominence largely without Mr. McAfee, after he resigned from the company in 1994. Intel, the computer chip maker, bought the company in 2010 for $7.7 billion, then sold its majority stake to an investment firm six years later.

Before and after its purchase by Intel, the company tried to distance itself from Mr. McAfee. In 2014, Intel changed the company’s name to Intel Security, but it never completely shook its attachment to its founder and the brand he helped create.

In 2016, when Mr. McAfee tried to use the name with a new security company, Intel filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent him from doing so. Intel and Mr. McAfee settled the lawsuit, with Mr. McAfee agreeing not to use his name in the field of cybersecurity.

Cade Metz contributed reporting.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

— William P. Davis and Coral Murphy Marcos

The pandemic, which devastated the airline business, has eased in the United States. Analysts believe that the industry will rebound strongly this summer, driven mainly by domestic leisure travel, and Southwest appears well positioned to take advantage of the rising demand for tickets.

“I think the timing is perfect,” Mr. Kelly said in an interview. “We’re just closing the books on celebrating 50 years last week and I like the imagery of kicking off the next 50 years with strong, fresh leadership.”

Southwest entered the pandemic in better financial health than other large airline companies. After suffering its first loss in nearly half a century last year, the company, which is based in Dallas, reported a profit in the first quarter, something the three other large airlines have yet to do since the pandemic began. Mr. Kelly said the company’s quick turnaround wouldn’t have been possible without loans and grants from the federal government.

Unlike its three largest competitors — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines — Southwest flies mostly within the United States and its international flights are to Mexico and other nearby countries that remain popular destinations for U.S. travelers. Its business should recover faster because it does not fly to Europe, Asia and other distant destinations for which travel demand is widely expected to recover slowly.

The airline has added flights to and from more than a dozen new airports since the pandemic began, including George Bush Intercontinental in Houston and O’Hare International in Chicago. This month, Southwest also revealed it had more than doubled an order for Boeing’s 737 Max airplane next year, committing to take 64 jets with the option to buy dozens more.

Still, Southwest will most likely face intense competition, particularly as smaller airlines, including Sun Country, Frontier and Sprit, try to expand and the other three large airlines shift more of their focus to domestic flights while international travel is depressed. Southwest also saw widespread delays and cancellations last week as it dealt with technical problems, first involving a supplier of data and then with its own systems.

Known for his jovial demeanor, Mr. Kelly, an accountant by training, has led Southwest with a steady hand. He is widely respected in the corporate world and is Southwest’s second-longest-serving chief executive, behind only Herb Kelleher, the airline’s charismatic co-founder, who died in 2019.

Mr. Jordan will be the airline’s sixth chief executive. And while he takes over a robust business, he will have to manage Southwest’s expanding network, try to preserve the airline’s quirky corporate culture — Southwest flight attendants, for example, frequently crack jokes and wear much less formal attire than attendants at other big airlines — and repay billions of dollars in loans it took out during the pandemic.

“If things are more erratic, I think that will be more of a challenge,” Mr. Kelly said.

The Transportation Security Administration screened 2.1 million people at airport checkpoints on Sunday, the most since the pandemic began. But that figure is down 23 percent from the same day in 2019. And while strong demand this summer seems likely, analysts have less confidence in what demand will look like in the fall and winter.

Mr. Jordan’s experience as a jack-of-all-trades may serve him well. He joined Southwest in 1988 as a computer programmer. Since then, he has held a number of finance, strategy, planning and other executive jobs. He helped develop the airline’s frequent flier program.

In 2011, Mr. Jordan was put in charge of integrating AirTran Airways after Southwest bought the company. That deal was unusual because unlike the other big U.S. airlines that were created by mergers between companies like Northwest and Delta and United and Continental, Southwest has grown mostly by adding new routes and airports to its network.

“I’m just blessed beyond belief,” he said in an interview. “The company has evolved and changed just so much, but the DNA of the Southwest Airlines that I walked into 33 years ago is completely in place today.”

In statements, the unions representing pilots and flight attendants, which have relatively good relations with Southwest’s management, thanked Mr. Kelly and welcomed Mr. Jordan.

“His technology and operational experience will be critical to our airline’s future,” Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest pilots’ union, said in a statement about Mr. Jordan.

Before Wednesday’s announcement, analysts believed Tom Nealon, Southwest’s president, and Mike Van de Ven, its chief operating officer, were in the running to succeed Mr. Kelly. Both men frequently represented the company in public, especially during quarterly calls with analysts and reporters, while Mr. Jordan made fewer such appearances. Mr. Kelly praised Mr. Nealon and Mr. Van de Ven in the company’s announcement and said all three were working on the transition.

It’s too soon to determine the overall impact on trade, especially for more than 180,000 British businesses whose only experience of international trade was with the European Union. New customs checks, veterinary requirements and other regulations have already restricted the movement of goods, and new agreements with far-flung countries aren’t expected to replace the deal Britain had with its nearest neighbors as a member of the trade bloc. By the government’s own estimates, its new trade deal with Australia will increase G.D.P. by as much as 500 million pounds (about $700 million) over 15 years, or 0.02 percent of output.

The financial services industry, one of Britain’s most prosperous sectors, resigned itself early to diminished status in Europe. This year, European shares and derivatives trading has shifted out of London, and banks are still moving employees to other European capitals. In response, the British government is trying to revive London’s reputation as a finance hub by overhauling rules on listings — welcoming SPACs, among other things — and loosening regulations for start-ups.

For many, Brexit was never about the economy, it was about immigration. Industries that relied heavily on European workers warned from the start about a looming labor crisis as it became harder for E.U. citizens to move to Britain. As the country recovers from the pandemic, that crisis has arrived.

Restaurants and hotels have been thwarted by staff shortages. There are warnings that there aren’t enough food production workers or truck drivers. Pandemic restrictions were a factor in foreign workers leaving the country, and industry groups are lobbying the government for exceptions to visa rules so that more chefs, truck drivers and butchers can be hired from the European Union, as they don’t expect those workers to easily return (or enough locals to step into the roles).

Britain’s last year in the bloc coincided with its worst recession in three centuries because of the pandemic. Recovering from the crisis won’t be easy for any country, but businesses in Britain are also contending with the end of a four-decade economic union. It could be another five years, or more, before we know the true shape of Britain’s post-Brexit economy.

White House officials, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said that the one-month extension, while influenced by concerns over a new wave of evictions, was prompted by the lag in vaccination rates in some parts of the country and by other factors that have extended the coronavirus crisis.

Forty-four House Democrats wrote to Mr. Biden and the C.D.C. director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, on Tuesday, urging them to put off allowing evictions to resume. “By extending the moratorium and incorporating these critical improvements to protect vulnerable renters, we can work to curtail the eviction crisis disproportionately impacting our communities of color,” the lawmakers wrote.

A spokesman for the C.D.C. did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Many local officials have also pressed to extend the freeze as long as possible, and are bracing for a rise in evictions when the federal moratorium and similar state and city orders expire over the summer.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced on Monday that his state had set aside $5.2 billion from federal aid packages to pay off the back rent of tenants who fell behind during the pandemic, an extraordinary move intended to wipe the slate clean for millions of renters.

Still, groups representing private landlords maintain that the health crisis that justified the freeze has ended, and that continuing the freeze even for an extra four weeks would be an unwarranted government intrusion in the housing market.

“The mounting housing affordability crisis is quickly becoming a housing affordability disaster fueled by flawed eviction moratoriums, which leave renters with insurmountable debt and housing providers holding the bag,” said Bob Pinnegar, president of the National Apartment Association, a trade group representing owners of large residential buildings.

On Wednesday, Raphael Bostic, who is a voter this year on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, said that he expects conditions for rate increases to be in place by late next year, and he suggested that the central bank might have made enough economic progress to begin dialing back its massive bond purchases after the next “few months.”

Europe

Most European stock indexes fell on Wednesday even as surveys of manufacturing and services activity showed economic momentum was building in June across the continent. In Germany, the composite Purchasing Managers’ Index climbed to its highest reading in a decade. The surveys for the eurozone also beat economists’ forecasts.

But the data for currency bloc and Britain showed prices were rising quickly, which is likely to further fuel concerns about inflation. In Britain, the rate of inflation for companies’ output prices reached a record high for the second month in a row.

“Companies responded to rising workloads by taking on extra staff at an unprecedented rate at the end of the second quarter,” wrote Chris Williamson, an economist at IHS Markit, which produces the surveys. “Also hitting previously unsurpassed levels, however, were rates of inflation of input costs and output prices” because of supply-chain disruption.

The Stoxx 600 Europe fell 0.7 percent. The CAC in France declined 0.9 percent and the DAX in Germany was down 1.2 percent. The FTSE 100 in Britain dropped 0.2 percent.

“By now, it is clear that cryptocurrencies are speculative assets rather than money, and in many cases are used to facilitate money laundering, ransomware attacks and other financial crimes,” the Bank for International Settlements said. “Bitcoin in particular has few redeeming public interest attributes when also considering its wasteful energy footprint.”

The article also warned that tech companies could issue digital currencies that would acquire dominant market positions, siphoning off a percentage of transactions that would be out of proportion to the service they provide.

The Bank for International Settlements acknowledged, though, that digital currencies were unstoppable, and offered detailed advice to central banks on how they might design their own counterparts.

Crucially, the bank said that, in contrast to cryptocurrencies, transactions with an official digital currency should not be anonymous. That would remove one of the main lures of cryptocurrencies to their boosters.

“Effective identification is crucial to every payment system,” the bank argued. “It guarantees the system’s safety and integrity, by preventing fraud and bolstering efforts to counter money laundering and other illicit activities.”