Leaders from four of America’s largest companies—Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google—were forced to defend themselves from a five-hour bipartisan barrage of questions and criticism from lawmakers Wednesday.
The hearing—convened virtually by the House Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee—provided lawmakers an opportunity to expand upon a lengthy antitrust investigation and doubled as a national spectacle, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook among the richest and most famous people in the world.
From the onset, however, lawmakers of both political parties were not awed and came armed with more than a million pages of investigatory documents and internal memos—some of which included the tech chiefs’ own words—as well as testimony from business leaders allegedly bullied out of the market by the companies.
In one exchange, subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-RI, asked Pichai, “Why does Google steal content from honest businesses?” Cicilline was referring to reports that Google, which boasts a 90% market share of internet search engine business, takes content from publishers and media outlets in response queries from Google’s search engine as opposed to simply providing a list of links to users.
Pichai said he disagreed with Cicilline’s characterization.
Google faced significant bipartisan pressure from lawmakers. In another testy exchange, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., criticized the company for withdrawing from competition for the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract and for not renewing work on the Pentagon’s Project Maven drone initiative. (Amazon and Microsoft are still locked in a battle for the JEDI contract now.) In both cases, the company c ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
