John Oliver has called out “anti-competitive conduct” of big tech, urging bipartisan support of bills that would help curb such behaviour.

On Last Week Tonight, the host said that “our experiences on the internet are now dominated by a small handful of companies who are getting pretty used to throwing their weight around”.

He said that each of the big tech behemoths – Apple, Amazon and Google – act as “gatekeeper over a key channel of distribution” and end up “suppressing their competition so completely that we’d never actually know if someone else could do it better”.

There are two bills with bipartisan support that could curtail some of the excesses but Oliver said they need to pass in the next month or so.

He then went back to tell the story of AT&T, the company that used to be in charge of both local and long-distance services as well as many related products. “Fuck AT&T now and forever,” Oliver said of the corporation that owned HBO until recently.