The biggest platforms are a new kind of monopoly. At last, lawmakers have figured out why that’s a problem.
When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill two years ago, the hearings were an embarrassing exercise in congressional cluelessness. They furthered a cliché: The doddering American political elite, who sometimes seemed to confuse Messenger with the passenger pigeon, would never have the savvy to keep up with the dynamism of Big Tech, let alone regulate it. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust thoroughly debunked that strand of conventional wisdom today. Hauling the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to testify together as a unit, the subcommittee produced a hearing that was the antithesis of the Zuckerberg fiasco of 2018. Congress gets kicked so often for doltish preening that it seems a great miracle when it actually does its job. David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, has conducted a master class in how to frame an issue and then press a case for action. Having hired the pathbreaking legal scholar Lina Khan to his staff, he spent a year subpoenaing documents from the companies, talking widely with their employees (and ex-employees), and interviewing legal experts. By the time the subcommittee called the CEOs, it had amassed deep knowledge and uncovered a damning paper trail. With many of their questions, members seemed to know the inner workings of the companies better than their executives. Asking about anticompetitive practices, Cicilline reduced Google’s Sundar Pichai to mumbling incoherently about kettlebells; using specific examples, the subcommittee members Pramila Jayapal and Joe Neguse prodded Amazon’s Jeff Bezos into admitting instances of his company’s anticompetitive behavior.
