 It's an honor to have this opportunity to testify before you today on behalf of Public Knowledge. I'm Charlotte Slayman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge, a non-profit that has represented the public interest for 20 years. We value an open internet, free expression, and access to affordable communications tools and creative works for everyone. I'm an antitrust lawyer and a former antitrust enforcement attorney at the Federal Trade Commission in the Anti-Competitive Practices Division. Competition is often the best way to make companies pay attention to what the people want. When companies face few competitors and are protected by high barriers to entry, they find they can ignore the interests of everyone else. That's where you come in. This subcommittee has undertaken a year-long investigation, an in-depth staff report, a series of hearings on the problems with competition and dominant digital platforms, and now this series of hearings to address those problems. This subcommittee is digging in and doing the work, building a record for new laws and rules that can actually promote competition on and against the most powerful digital platforms. Important antitrust cases have already been filed by enforcers of both parties against Google and Facebook, but it is still vitally important that Congress take up these concerns in a more proactive and comprehensive manner than antitrust alone can achieve. This hearing rightly zeroes in on the concept of gatekeeper power, the special power that platforms have over businesses and consumers that rely on them to reach each other. This power is the root of the problem. Gatekeepers can impose contract terms like high prices or unfair data access requirements. Gatekeepers can also use their power to protect themselves from potential competitive threats. By discriminating and by withholding interoperability, gatekeepers can pick themselves as winners in a market while ensuring rivals and potential rivals remain losers. These gatekeepers exploit incumbency advantages or barriers to entry, features of the market that make it especially difficult for anyone to challenge the gatekeeper. Network effects, especially prevalent among these digital platforms, occur when a platform becomes exponentially better and more useful as more and more users join the service. This creates a chicken and egg problem for a new entrance. You need users to get users. Share size can keep customers locked in, even when there are superior options available. When the problem is network effects, the solution is interoperability. Both the subcommittee's majority report and the ranking member's third-way report highlighted interoperability as a potential remedy. Public knowledge believes there can be bipartisan consensus on interoperability, and we are excited to work with you to make that happen. Just as our phone networks are already interoperable, you don't have to worry whether the person you're calling is on Verizon's or AT&P's network. Facebook should be required to offer interoperability with its network to competitors and potential competitors. For a new social network, this would help address that chicken and egg problem. Innovative competitors could compete on a level playing field with dominant platforms. Interoperability requirements like this are absolutely necessary to reinvigorate competition on and against digital gatekeepers. Interoperability creates lasting change to the structure of platform markets. For markets where a gatekeeper controls access to key components, it will be incredibly difficult to sustain multiple competitors without interoperability, leaving us again with the gatekeeper problem. Interoperability requirements should be carefully tailored to maximize competition and innovation. They will need to change as technology changes. Finding and choosing the most efficient options requires a level of technical detail and frequent updating best suited for an agency regulator. Congress should give clear rulemaking authority to an agency to require interoperability from gatekeeper platforms for competitors or potential competitors that meet baseline privacy and safety requirements. In conclusion, the world we live in today where a single company can dominate search, shopping, or social networking is not inevitable. It is instead the result of our policy choices. We have a market structure that tends towards monopoly because policymakers have chosen not to intervene yet, but it is not too late to make a different choice. This led by this subcommittee's sterling work can and indeed must pass new laws like interoperability and non-discrimination requirements. Thank you.