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Big Tech CEOs grilled by Congress: Key moments from the historic antitrust meeting:
For five hours on Wednesday, the four Big Tech CEOs of the world's most powerful companies faced a grilling from US lawmakers in Washington, in an unprecedented hearing over alleged anti-competitive practices at their companies.
The hearing was the first time that Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google's parent Alphabet appeared together before Congress.
The Big Tech CEOs, appearing via video link, all faced moments in the spotlight from the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, with Pichai and Zuckerberg receiving the most attention. It was sixth and final hearing into competition in the digital market by the committee, and a culmination of more than 1.3 million documents and hundreds of hours of interviews and testimonies.
There are long-standing concerns that the four companies, worth a combined $4.85tn, have become too dominant for rivals to compete on the same level.
Antitrust regulators fear that a lack of competition will lead to higher prices for consumers. However, when digital platforms offer services for free – as Facebook and Google do – it is difficult for lawmakers to prove that consumers are worse off.
Another charge is that a lack of competition stifles innovation, which in theory could lead to subpar products and services for consumers. But given the four tech giants are known for being at the cutting edge of innovation, this is again difficult to prove.
As such, Congress is considering new antitrust laws that are appropriate for the digital age, which could prevent so much power being concentrated in so few companies.
Here are some of the key topics the Big Tech CEOs were grilled on.
Here's a couple YouTube streams of the hearing from Reuters (6½h) & C-SPAN3 (5½hr).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (6 children)
The big tech are a much bigger problem than a "trust". All those basic freedoms specified in the bill of rights only restrict oppression by the government. Back in those days only the government could do you irreparable harm by persecuting you for your dissenting views. Free speech meant that the government could not jail you for opposing its policy. Freedom of the press meant that your publication could not be shut down by the government if you printed something it didn't like. The requirement for due process stopped the government from throwing you in jail on a whim and then looking for a phony "crime" to catch you on.
The big corps changed all that by becoming the place where public discourse takes place, without being in any way restricted by the constitution. What meaning does "free speech" have if you are only allowed to speak it in back alley #47 between 2pm and 3pm? Today the big tech can deplatform you and overnight nobody will even know you exist, much less hear your views.
What meaning does "freedom of the press" have if you have no means of distributing what you publish? Being deplatformed deprives you of any way of reaching an audience because they are all on the big tech platforms. If you can't be on the platform, the vast majority of the population won't read what you publish, or even be able to find it.
What protection does "due process" offer when the corps can fire you for speaking your mind, barring you from future employment, and preventing you from working for any competing company in your field? Your life is ruined just as much as if you had been thrown in prison.
The constitution was written specifically to address government oppression, but today we can plainly see that it is not only the government that has the power of brutal oppression. Today's big corps have far more power over you than the eighteenth century government had and it is time we recognized this and stopped their oppression by making the constitution apply to private companies as well as the government.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @02:54PM
They still are restricted by the Constitution. A key example is that collaboration with government to suppress rights is still prohibited. They can't act as a proxy for government malfeasance.
Nonsense. For example, during the Revolutionary War that formed the US, the British had engaged in a variety of activities that no modern corporation is capable of duplicating - destruction of property, murder, rape, arbitrary imprisonment and forced work. Don't confuse moderately better information gathering capability with power. The British of that time didn't need to know the full intimate details of your Facebook posts, buying habits, or your web browsing behavior in order to have power. They just needed to know where the things they were going to tax, destroy, or ruin were.
Not a real world thing. People do a lot worse than speaking your mind and still manage to get rehired.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday July 31 2020, @04:48PM
This guy gets it.
Story of my life.
This is why bribery is ultimately evil, why cults have to be kept separated from religions and companies, and why corporate personhood is so godawfully tyrannical.
I was watching epsteins depositions, you can find them on youtube. He takes the 5th on almost every question.
How many prisoners in secret detention in chicago's "black site" get to do that? none.
The rich get all the rights and the poor get no rights, meaning there are no rights, because they have to be bought, and everything has a price.
So it is really government as a service, epstein got the paid for service of not having to answer questions. CNN has the paid for service of freedom of speech(propaganda). Soon corporate robots will have the 2nd amendment and be able to legally shoot you by accident, a paid for service.
Whether facegag(odd, i was using this to describe facebk last year and now look what happened....facegags everywhere....hmmm) should censor content is a trick question, you are damned if you do damned if you don't. If you say they cant, censor people, then you have to give them freedom to say anything and game the algorithm for what they want to say at the expense of all else, if you say they have to censor, then they go after their enemies so their content is all that is left.
The entire principle of government needs to be reworked, but I think these ceos know this, and recognize that there is an inevitable collapse, which we may be experiencing already, but they are going to have this whole new control mechanism ready to roll out as the replacement to "save us from the chaos" of the old system, that they themselves broke.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(and if you care about this topic, you should now that people like myself who have been talking about this for a long time are being impoversished due to our exclusion, failure to comply, inherent censorhip when you boycott a platform or run from it because their rules allow abuse against their opponents, which I also encounter here btw...so if you care about this topic, contribute to my work or soon there wont be anyone like me left with any power to amplify their message at all.)
https://archive.is/SoybE [archive.is]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday July 31 2020, @05:48PM (2 children)
I have plenty of complaints about big tech and corporate power in general, but I'd say your argument went off the rails here.
You can print pamphlets and stand in the middle of town handing them out, just like the old days. The digital equivalent of this is also possible for $$$
The best thing to do about abusive services is to not use them. When they try to force people to use it by way of shady business practices or technological tomfoolery, that's when they need to get slapped down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @08:12PM (1 child)
The problem with abusive ISPs is that there is very limited competition. What do we do then?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday August 01 2020, @08:11AM
Wish I knew!
There's always "vote with your feet."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @07:40PM
The last time I checked, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dutch Ministry of the Interior, European Commission, Finnish Interior Ministry, Norwegian Ministry of Justice, Public Safety Canada, Swedish Ministry of Justice, UK Home Office, US State Department, and MI6 [catbox.moe] could be considered "the government".
As could the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Russia [catbox.moe].
"But at least it's not the government!" everyone keeps saying, while the government arrests anyone who tries to build up an alternative service which is not under government control. [breakermag.com] (This guy once hired a whore who said she was 19 but was underage. The government somehow learned of that, crossed international lines to arrest him for that, and smeared him as a pedophile in the press to justify such drastic action for a non-crime with no mens rea. The real reason for arresting him is that he made a competitor to Patreon.)