“I don’t know the details of that situation,” replied Mr. Bezos.
At another time, Mr. Pichai asked to explain whether it was anti-competitive for Google to threaten to remove Yelp from the list if it did not allow the company’s search engine to use its listings in its featured snippets, he said he was “happy to participate and understand the details “at a later date. Yelp has publicly complained about the Google search engine for years.
And confronted with emails acquired by House of Representatives investigators in which Apple employees promised to speed up a company through its App Store approval process, an apparent contradiction to Mr. Cook’s claim that it dealt with all developers alike. I don’t know about that, sir.
Offer this to executives: It’s difficult to have nuanced conversations about complex and often technical issues in front of an audience of hostile politicians, some of whom seemed more interested in generating fiery clips for their Facebook pages than investigating antitrust concerns. And the panel’s format – quick rounds of questions asked via videoconference, with each member having only five minutes at a time to question witnesses – almost guarantees that the conversation will stay on the surface.
In addition, many Republican subcommittee members seemed to have no interest in antitrust issues, preferring to ride partisan hobby horses as claims of anti-conservative bias on social media.
But many Democratic members came armed with real and substantive questions that deserved a more complete broadcast. The executives’ decision to avoid these questions, or their inability to answer before being interrupted, may indicate that they still believe they can circle around Congress without engaging in detailed and tough discussions about how they exercise their power.
That may have been a reasonable conclusion to draw after the past few years, a period when the Silicon Valley giants added hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, while Washington barely took a look at it. Despite numerous clamor, lawmakers did not pass any meaningful privacy or data protection laws during the time President Trump was in office, and Trump has shown little interest in any technology regulation that does not involve his own Twitter account. .
But it is less clear that a strategy of saying nothing will continue to work, now that lawmakers have begun to do their homework. Sure, some members of Congress may still need their iPhones explained to them, but there’s a real experience on Capitol Hill that wasn’t there even a year ago, and new allies who are willing to give Congress the ammunition it needs.
