The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congress questions ‘Big Tech’ CEOs
House panel investigating market dominance of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple grills executives over practices.
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 — were answering for their companies’ practices before Congress as a House panel capped its yearlong investigation of market dominance in the industry.
The powerful CEOs sought to defend 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.
In its bipartisan investigation, the Judiciary subcommittee collected testimony from midlevel executives of the four firms, competitors and legal experts, and pored over more than a million internal documents from the companies. A key question: whether existing competition policies and century-old antitrust laws are adequate for overseeing the tech giants, or if new legislation and enforcement funding are needed.
Subcommittee chairman Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, has called the four companies monopolies, although he says breaking them up should be a last resort.
“Simply put, they have too much power,” Cicilline said in opening remarks Wednesday, as he laid out data pointing up the power of the four tech companies as essential cogs of commerce and communications.
Veering from the issue of market competition, a leading conservative Republican on the panel aired long-standing grievances against the big tech companies of censoring conservative viewpoints. “Big Tech is out to get conservatives,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.
■ TikTok pledged Wednesday it will allow U.S. regulators and privacy experts to take a closer look under its digital hood, offering them the ability to “examine” its underlying software code in response to claims it is handing off data to the Chinese government.