Congressional panel grills Big Tech CEOs over market dominance
WASHINGTON — Fending off accusations of stifling competition, four Big Tech CEOs — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple — sought to answer for their companies’ practices before Congress as a House panel caps its yearlong investigation of market dominance in the industry.
The CEOs defended their companies amid intense grilling by lawmakers Wednesday. The executives provided bursts of data showing how competitive their markets are, and the value of their innovation and essential services to consumers. But they sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices. They also confronted a range of other concerns about alleged political bias, their effect on U.S. democracy and their role in China.
The four CEOs were testifying remotely to lawmakers, most of whom were sitting, in masks, inside the hearing room in Washington.
Among the toughest questions for Google and Amazon involved accusations that they used their dominant platforms to scoop up
data about competitors in a way that gave them an unfair advantage.
Bezos said in his first testimony to Congress that he couldn’t guarantee that the company had not accessed seller data to make competing products, an allegation that the company and its executives have previously denied.
“We have a policy against using seller specific data to aid our private label business,” Bezos said in a response to a question from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, DWash. “But I can’t guarantee to you that that policy hasn’t been violated.”
Pichai’s opening remarks touted Google’s value to mom-and-pop businesses in Bristol, Rhode Island, and Pewaukee, Wisconsin, in the home districts of the antitrust panel’s Democratic chairman, Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, and its ranking Republican, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin.
But the Google executive struggled as Cicilline accused the company of leveraging its dominant search engine to steal ideas and information from other websites and manipulating its results to drive people to its own digital services to boost its profits.
Pichai repeatedly deflected Cicilline’s attacks by asserting that Google tries to provide the most helpful and relevant information to the hundreds of millions of people who use its search engine each day in an effort to keep them coming back instead of defecting to a rival service.
As Democrats largely focused on market competition, several Republicans aired longstanding grievances that the tech companies are censoring conservative voices and questioned their business activities in China. “Big Tech is out to get conservatives,” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said.
In a tweet before the hearing, President Donald Trump challenged Congress to crack down on the companies, which he has accused, without evidence, of bias against him and conservatives in general.