Tech industry titans are expected to clash with House lawmakers Wednesday during a historic, highly anticipated hearing on monopolies and misinformation.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified together for the first time, before a House Judiciary subcommittee that’s spent the past year investigating how the online platforms dominate their markets, sometimes to the detriment of competition and innovation.
Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a member of the panel, foreshadowed how the Big Tech appearances would likely lead to “significant changes” to U.S. antitrust law.
“We can’t leave it to these companies to self-police. That’s not going to happen,” Jayapal told CNN Wednesday morning. “We need to protect mom and pop businesses and, you know, choice, essentially, for consumers.”
The executives outlined their defenses Tuesday night, releasing their written opening statements.
“As I understand our laws, companies aren’t bad just because they are big,” Zuckerberg said in his prepared remarks.
He added, leaning into anti-China rhetoric: “Although people around the world use our products, Facebook is a proudly American company. We believe in values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression — that the American economy was built on. Many other tech companies share these values, but there’s no guarantee our values will win out.”
Bezos touted Amazon’s record of creating jobs in-house and support of small- and medium-sized retailers that sell their wares through the e-commerce giant, though he cited Shopify and Instacart as emerging rivals.
Cook echoed Bezos’s employment argument. He contended that the “smartphone market is fiercely competitive” among Samsung, LG, Huawei, and Google.
To that end, Pichai suggested Google is fending off a growing list of alternate information sources, even if they aren’t considered traditional search engines. He named Amazon’s Alexa, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Snapchat as examples. Pichai stuck up for Google’s ad scheme as well, with Instagram, Pinterest, and Comcast as other means to market products and services.
Bezos’s, Cook’s, Zuckerberg’s, and Pichai’s testimonies, given via video link, come less than 100 days before the 2020 general elections, a cycle marred by free speech and misinformation complications.
Zuckerberg has been under increasing pressure to fact-check and censor on Facebook after Twitter hid President Trump’s “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet behind a warning banner. Twitter claimed the missive glorified violence during the civil unrest provoked by George Floyd’s death.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was partially suspended from Twitter just this week for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful misinformation” about the controversial anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in relation to COVID-19.
“We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg told Fox News in May. “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general, private companies probably shouldn’t be — especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Zuckerberg’s been subjected to criticism from the GOP too over allegations that Facebook has a pro-liberal slant.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, another panelist on Wednesday, filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Zuckerberg this month, accusing him of lying to Congress in 2018 about his organization’s anti-conservative bias.
Wednesday’s hearing was Bezos’s first.
Bezos, Trump’s frequent political foil, has positioned himself in recent years to exert more influence in Washington. He invested about $2.5 billion to build a secondary Amazon campus in the greater metro area while receiving $573 million in incentives to do so. In addition to a home he purchased near Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, he bought the local newspaper the Washington Post.
