Senators push Amazon, Google on connected IoT device market

At the beginning of the hearing, Sen. Michael Lee (R-Utah) echoed Klobuchar’s concerns and questioned if the connected IoT device market is one more way for big tech firms to “expand their already significant market power.”

Wilson White, senior director of public policy and government relations at Google, described the connected device industry as fast-moving, hypercompetitive, but nascent. In his opening statement, White said Google believes that open platforms enable competition and the company has pushed for openness across the broad range of connected devices.

To wit: In 2019, Google helped stand up an independent working group focused on building an open connectivity standard for smart home devices, according to White. Last month, the working group announced an interoperable secure connectivity standard called Matter, which he said Google plans to integrate into its Android and Nest products.

“Open standards foster competition Ryan McCrate, vice president and associate general counsel for Alexa at Amazon, said the company’s invention of the Echo smart speaker and investment in developing Alexa has “meaningfully increased competition in the voice assistant and smart home space.”

As the number of voice assistants grows, McCrate said it’s “critically important” that customers can choose several assistants based on preference or task rather than be tied to a single product. That was the driving force behind Amazon’s Voice Interoperability Initiative, which includes more than 80 companies working to give customers “access to multiple, simultaneous voice services on a single device,” McCrate said.

Despite these efforts, Eddie Lazarus, chief legal officer at wireless speaker provider Sonos, argued that neither Google nor Amazon have lived up to their interoperability commitments. At Sonos, providing access to different voice assistants is not aspirational.

But, “Google contractually prohibits us from using that technology,” Lazarus said. “And the Voice Interoperability Initiative, which is an excellent idea and we appreciate that Amazon is partnering with companies, is just an onramp into the Amazon ecosystem because you can’t mix and match between the big companies. That mixing-and-matching ability is crucial when you talk about interoperability.”

White argued there are challenges with having a single speaker offer multiple assistants that need to be worked through, such as data privacy and consumer confusion.