Tech CEOs vs. Congress: Everything you need to know
Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you're about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and belief, so help you God?
Yes, yes.
Let the record show the witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Thank you and you may remain seated.
The CEOs of America's biggest tech companies have officially been grilled.
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Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook appeared in front of Congress to face questions from the House Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee.
This has been in the works for more than a year.
And the committee had just one thing in mind, interrogating some of the biggest companies in America about just how much power they hold.
There were questions on everything from anti competitive behaviour and bullying tactics to censorship and American values.
Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have a combined value of $4.8 billion.
That's bigger than the economy of Italy, but the CEOs had just one message.
They are not too big.
Our services are about connection and our business model is advertising and we face intense competition and both.
Many of our competitors have hundreds of millions or billions of users in many areas.
We're behind our competitors.
But the committee wasn't willing to let these four men off to easy and they came prepared with plenty of emails and testimony.
From small businesses that claim they being squeezed out, the hearing got pretty fiery and not just with the CEOs.>> You do not have the time.
Controls, Director mask on your mask on Mr. Georgia.>> I'm gonna break down six hours of testimony for you in just a couple of minutes.
Starting with Amazon.
Now, it was Jeff Bezos, his first appearance in front of Congress and they didn't go too easy on him.
He was grilled about how Amazon promotes its own products through Alexa speakers, about whether it prevents competing streaming services from living on its fire devices.
And the big one, whether Amazon scrapes data from third party sellers to release competing products on the Amazon Marketplace.
At one point, the chair of the subcommittee said that Amazon has become so big that third party sellers describe it as a drug
In the past for lack of a better term.
We call it Amazon heroin, because you just kept going, and you had to get your next fix your next check.
But at the end of the day, you find out that this person who was seemingly benefiting you, make you feel good was just ultimately going to be your downfall and quote.
So mr.
Bezos, this is one of your partners.
Why on earth would they compare your company to a drug dealer?
Sir, I have great respect for you in this committee, but I completely disagree with that characterization.
So it's argued that Amazon actually started out only selling its own products and it let third party sellers onto the Amazon store.
Actually increasing competition.
But as for whether it is great starter from those third party sellers.
We continue to look into that very carefully.
I am not yet satisfied that we have gotten to the bottom of it and we are going to keep looking at it.
Okay, next up Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced questions about the company's relationship with China.
And whether Google suppresses conservative voices Mr. Pichai?
Is Google going to tailor its features to help Joe Biden in the 2020 election?
Congressman, we approach our work.
We support both campaigns today.
We think political ads is an important part of free speech and democratic societies and we.
Engage with campaigns, you know, according to law, and we approach our work in a non partisan way.
But it wasn't just questions around politics.
Google's big showdown was around advertising and search.
Google owns a massive proportion of the digital advertising space and Congress members wanted to know whether it should have that much power.
So, say in Seattle, D's electronics, a mom and pop business wants to buy online ad space in the Seattle Times.
D's electronics would need to go to a middleman like Google ads, which would then bid for ad space on an Ad Exchange.
The problem is, Google controls all of these entities.
So it's running the marketplace It's acting on the buy side and it's acting on the sell side at the same time, which is a major conflict of interest.
This won't be the last we hear on this topic.
The US Department of Justice is already investigating Google's digital advertising business and IT.
And it's expected to file a lawsuit against the company this summer, okay, Facebook.
Now Mark Zuckerberg was talking about how much competition the company has, but Facebook has roughly the same number of users as the population of the world.
Largest countries combined, and the House Committee members had some big questions about how Facebook wields that power, especially when it comes to deciding what is and isn't allowed on the platform.
It was reported that Donald Trump Jr, got taken down for a period of time.
Because he puts something up.
The advocacy hydroxychloroquine Why does that happen?
Congressman, well, first to be clear, I think what you might be referring to happened on on Twitter.
So it's hard for me to speak to that, but I can talk to our policies about us.
We do prohibit content that will lead to imminent risk of harm, and stating that there's a proven cure for Covid, when there is in fact none, might encourage someone to go take something that could have some adverse effects.
So we do take that down.
But it wasn't just free speech versus misinformation Zach was also grilled about the company's habit of releasing copycat products to scare off its competitors.
Did you ever use this very similar Facebook camera product to threaten Instagrams founder, Kevin Systrom?
Congressman, I'm not sure what you would mean by threatened.
I think it was public that we were building.
A camera app at the time.
That was a well documented thing.
Let me tell you that Mr. In a chat you told Mr Sandstrom that Facebook was, quote developing our own photos strategy.
So how we engage now will also determine how much we're partners versus competitors.
Down the line.
Were there any other companies that you used the same tactic with while attempting to buy them?
Congresswoman, I wanna respectfully disagree with the characterization.
I think it was clear that this was a space that we were going to Compete in one way or another.
I don't view those conversations as a threat in any way.
And finally, Apple.
After a flurry of early questions, CEO Tim Cook kinda flew under the radar, but he was quizzed about the power of the App Store, and just how much of the cut Apple takes from its developers.
The big question whether Apple blocks third party apps that compete with its own products, like say screentime management apps that reportedly disappeared from the App Store after Apple launched its own screentime app.
Does Apple have the power to exclude apps from the app store?
If you look at the history of this Congresswoman, we've increased the number of apps from 500 to 1.7 million.
So there's a very wide gate for the App Store.
And there's fierce competition for developers.
And we want Every app we can on the platform,>> there was a lot that went down and plenty of answers were met with a can we get back to you on that one guys?
So this definitely isn't the last we've heard about these antitrust issues.
But as always, here, it's saying that we'll be ready to explain them for you, even if it means sitting through hours and hours of congressional hearings.
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