All eyes were on Capitol Hill to see if Congress could focus on whether the four largest tech companies of our time were indeed monopolies. What happened instead was rhetoric and anarchy.
Whatever the expectation was that the House Judiciary Subcommittee was focused on the antitrust and its questions were told, before this hearing was quickly dashed: it became clear in a few minutes that members of Congress were few or Were going to take their time to ask more questions. They wanted four tech titans who were assembled before them.
Scattershot questions were asked, ranging from personal complaints of representatives against Gmail’s spam filter, to the views of four culture CEOs that they supported the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Many did manage to stick to the program: Pramila Jaipal of Washington State asked some of four very direct questions about her data collection practices, whether she had ever mimicked her rivals, and whether they were systematically From controlling all sides of it are monopolizing the advertising market.
But amid moments of cut-off from Jaipal – as well as Rep. Mary Gay Schnallon, Joe Neguse, Lucy McBath, Chairman David Cicilline, and a few others who mostly focused on antitrust questions and whether companies are too much power – other Ohioans Members like Jim Jordan and Florida’s Matt Getz seemed to grind individual axes with four CEOs.
Jordan and Getz, both Republicans, spent several seasons accusing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai of accusing their platform of censoring conservative news platforms, an issue that has dogged Big Tech for years. Is doing but has little to do with antitrust allegations. Activity against them.
At one point Florida representative Greg Stube probably misunderstood Google CEO Pichai as his personal tech support to find out why his campaign emails are being filtered into the spam folders of his constituents. One particular line of question that Getz chose to go down on was whether Google cooperated with the Chinese military at any point, an allegation that Pichai certainly said was “absolutely a lie.”
Lack of attention
Almost all members of the committee had moments of reversal. Instead of focusing on how much power Big Tech wielded on its rivals and whether they should be broken like a monopoly, viewers heard about these allegations of conservative bias, dissemination of misinformation, and where revenue from news advertising Comes (or not)) these days. In fact, another member of Wisconsin’s Jim Sensbenner’s ranking, during his second round of questioning, chose to take time out about how he thought big companies had a good thing, a clear pro-monopoly.
Bezos, in particular, was back on his heels when he went through his final round with representatives. It was Bezos’ first time before Congress and many eyes were on him to respond to Amazon’s market dominance.
“It was controversial how little she knew about the crimes that Amazon committed against us,” said Dania Rajendra, director of Athena Coalition, a pro-labor organization that aims to improve Amazon’s labor practices.
Rajendra told , “Mr. Bezos has a huge amount of electricity in our everyday lives. “And it was really something to see how many times he suggested that he needed to bring someone back, and the way he can’t back it was a corporate policy, and failing to implement it What were the consequences for. . “
What’s next for Big Tech?
Outside of some tough moments for Zuckerberg and Bezos, there is little concern about the possibility of Big Tech. Trying to question all four men simultaneously meant that lawbreakers barely pressed any one topic for long. Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped out of the hearing compared to the other three. In addition to the fact that many members had chosen not to take up Apple’s purpose, he was asked by Jayapala to employ an option line about protecting children’s privacy when asked why some apps were removed from the App Store. Was able to
Looking ahead, of course, the question is whether any regulatory steps can or should be taken against these big companies.
Kevin DeDino, president of KCD PR and board member of the Cyber Center for Excellence, told that he believed there was a way to course-correct through regulation.
“Any change is going to have some kind of material impact on the company’s bottom lines, and that will reduce our rank and harm people in the financial situation,” Dino said. The fate of these large scale companies. “I don’t see how breaking them is even possible at this point. I really think they’ve grown too big, but that’s because of their own success.”
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