President Donald Trump told reporters that Apple CEO Tim Cook was at the White House on Thursday (June 13), according to a report by Bloomberg.
The president didn’t give the reason for the visit, only saying that Cook “just left our office,” at a lunch meeting with governors.
The visit comes as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FCC) have split duties on probes into Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, looking into potential privacy issues and monopolistic behavior. Apple is being investigated by the DOJ.
Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s antitrust division, said the tech giants are “digital gatekeepers.” The president has been critical of Big Tech companies, saying that “there is something going on in terms of monopoly,” and that the U.S. should sue them.
In other Big Tech news, Amazon is officially the world’s most valuable brand, valued at $315.5 billion, according to a newly-released global ranking.
Apple comes in second at $309.5 billion, and Google comes in third at $309 billion. Amazon is up 52 percent from last year, noted a report by CNBC.
The rankings were released on Tuesday (June 11) and come via the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand ranking 2019, which is put together by the WPP research agency Kantar. Google had the number one spot last year, and along with Apple, has spent 12 years atop the list.
Doreen Wang, Kantar’s global head of BrandZ, said that the reason Amazon took the top spot was because of the different services it offered.
“Amazon’s phenomenal brand value growth of almost $108 billion in the last year demonstrates how brands are now less anchored to individual categories and regions. The boundaries are blurring as technology fluency allow brands, such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba, to offer a range of services across multiple consumer touchpoints,” she said.
