Tech Execs Face Congress: 9 Big Takeaways
Tags: Apple, Business, Google, Facebook, Amazon

Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg beamed into a congressional hearing via video chat today to face 4+ hours of questions about whether they abuse their dominant positions in the market. Spoiler: they said everything’s cool.

By Chloe Albanesius & Michael Kan

The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook faced the House Judiciary Committee virtually today, where they fielded questions about whether their respective tech companies take advantage of their dominant positions in the market to enhance their bottom lines.

Spoiler: They all said they don’t.

As you’d expect, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered rosy assessments of their platforms during opening statements. But the limited time each member of Congress got to ask questions didn’t allow for much additional explanation from the CEOs, many of whom are used to answering questions with winding speeches full of Silicon Valley platitudes.

Members on both sides of the aisle had bones to pick with the CEOs. The Democrats largely focused on the antitrust issues at hand: whether Amazon keeps its third-party sellers on a tight leash; if Google favors its own products in search; whether Facebook’s acquisitions served only to thwart competition; and if Apple’s fabled walled-garden approach persists.

Some Republicans did, too, but a few veered off course to quiz the execs on pet projects: Google allegedly discriminating against conservatives; Google pulling out of the Pentagon’s JEDI project; and why a certain member’s campaign emails keep ending up in his father’s spam folder.

The four-hour-plus hearing covered a lot of ground, and some topics were more interesting than others. Here are some of the highlights.

Facebook

Facebook-Instagram: Illegal Merger or a Savvy Dealmaking?

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) accused Facebook of breaking antitrust laws by acquiring Instagram back in 2012 because it knew Instagram posed a potential threat to its hold over the social media market.

“In your own words you bought Instagram to neutralize the competitive threat. This was an illegal merger at the time of the transaction,” Nadler claimed, citing internal documents provided by Facebook. “Why should Instagram not be broken off into a separate company?”

Zuckerberg acknowledged he saw Instagram as a competitor, but only in the mobile-photo sharing space. The FTC also scrutinized and approved the acquisition in 2012. “I think with hindsight, it probably looks obvious that Instagram would’ve reached the scale it has today, but at the time it was far from obvious,” he said, citing other top platforms of the time, like the now-defunct Path.

According to Zuckerberg, Instagram’s success is largely due to Facebook’s investment. “I think this has been an American success story,” he added.

Nadler disagreed. “Rather than compete with [Instagram], Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anticompetitive acquisition that the antitrust laws were designed to prevent. This should have never happened in the first place,” he said.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Photo by Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images)

Are You Threatening Me?

Nadler and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, (D-Washington), both brought up Zuckerberg’s negotiations with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom ahead of the merger.

“In a chat you told Mr. Systrom that Facebook ‘was developing our own photo strategy, so how we engage now will also determine how much we are partners versus competitors down the line,’” Rep. Jayapal noted. “Instagram’s founder seemed to think that was a threat. He confided in an investor at the time that he feared you would go into ‘destroy mode’ if he didn’t sell Instagram to you.”

Zuckerberg denied it was a threat and characterized his email as a negotiating tactic. “I think it was clear this was a space where we were going to compete in, one way or another,” he said.

Preventing Imminent Risk of Life

Twitter was not present at today’s hearing, but its policies came up nonetheless. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, asked Zuckerberg why it had temporarily banned Donald Trump Jr. this week for sharing a COVID-19 conspiracy theory. Zuckerberg noted that it was Twitter, not Facebook, that took action against the president’s son. But Zuckerberg explained why the move was probably the correct one.

The video shared by Trump, Jr. featured a doctor who said that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID-19, which it does not. So while Facebook allows discussion around trials for drugs or personal experiences with experimental drugs, it does not allow people to definitively state that there is a cure for a disease when there isn’t one, Zuckerberg said.

“In general…we do not want to be the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg continued. But if “someone is going to go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to clear COVID and that statement could lead people to take a drug … we think that we should take that down. That could cause imminent risk of life.”

Later in the hearing, Pichai agreed with that line of thinking when Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, asked why the video in question was also removed from YouTube.

“We believe in freedom of expression and there’s a lot of debate on effective ways to deal with COVID. But during a pandemic, we look to local health authorities [and] the CDC for guidelines around medical misinformation and [how it] might cause harm in the real world,” Pichai said.