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Big Tech CEOs Grilled by Congress: Key Moments From the Historic Antitrust Meeting

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 31 2020, @11:50AM   
from the medium-rare dept.

chromas writes:

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).

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Original Submission

• Re:Corporate government (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @02:54PM

  by khallow (3766) on Friday July 31 2020, @02:54PM (#1029315) Journal

  The big corps changed all that by becoming the place where public discourse takes place, without being in any way restricted by the constitution.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Not a real world thing. People do a lot worse than speaking your mind and still manage to get rehired.

  Parent