The congressional antitrust hearing showed that concerns about the tech stars aren’t going away.
Wednesday’s five-plus-hour congressional probing of the bosses of America’s tech giants did not reveal a singular “gotcha” moment or smoking gun email. We’ve heard many of these examples of Big Tech abuse before.
But the power of this hearing and others like it was the cumulative repetition of tales of abusive behavior, and evidence of the harm this has had on people’s lives.
The spectacle also showed that the impact of congressional investigations is the digging that happens when the C-SPAN cameras are turned off.
Worries about America’s tech stars have swirled for years. It’s clear now that this isn’t going away. In world capitals, courtrooms and among the public, we are wrestling with what it means for tech giants to have enormous influence on our lives, elections, economy and minds.
And while what happens to the future of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook is anyone’s guess, it was clear from Wednesday’s hearing that Congress was pointing the way for other branches of government to pick up the digging from here.
We saw on Wednesday old emails and texts from Mark Zuckerberg, worried about Facebook losing ground to Instagram and suggesting that buying competing apps is an effective way to take out the competition. The big deal here: Trying to reduce competition by purchasing a rival is a violation of antitrust law. (Zuckerberg said that Instagram’s success wasn’t assured when Facebook bought it.)
Representatives said that their interviews with former Amazon employees backed up news reports that the company used private data from its merchants to make its own version of their products.
The subcommittee discussed their conversations with companies that claimed Google funneled web searches to services it owned rather than to rivals like Yelp. Through company documents and questioning, members of Congress picked apart Apple’s stance that it treats all app developers the same.
