WhydoesGooglestealcontent,askUS lawmakers

The heads of US' top four technology companies-Facebook Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc, and Apple Inc--faced tough questions on their alleged monopolistic behaviour by US lawmakers in a historic anti-trust hearing late Wednesday.

Apple's Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and Facebook's Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg virtually testified to the House Judiciary's sub-committee on antitrust and commercial law.

Majority of the questions were aimed at Facebook and Google's dominance in their respective market and the use of their "market power" for "monopolistic behavior", while Apple faced the least questions among the four companies. Google came under particular fire for lawmakers for its search engine practices wherein it was accused of undermining traffic to particular websites, which the company saw as a threat. David N Cicilline, head of the anti-trust panel in his opening question to Google asked: "Why does Google steal content?" Google's Pichai said he disagreed with the "characterisation". "The evidence seems very clear to me that as Google became the gateway to the Internet, it began to abuse its power," Cicilline said. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 came under particular scrutiny with a conversation in which Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom told an investor that Facebook will go on "destroy mode" if he did not sell being cited. Zuckerberg said his conversation with Systrom wasn't meant as a threat. Lawmakers accused Amazon of using data on products of thirdparty sellers on its online electronic commerce platform to promote its own branded products.