A Congress that has largely soured on Silicon Valley is beginning to figure out how to hold it to account
Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust on Wednesday in Washington. | Graeme Jennings/Pool via AP
That put to rest any notion that the tech executives were facing a unified bipartisan front ready to drill down on antitrust abuses. And while the hearing produced few of the full-out tech gaffes that Congress has become known for, top subcommittee Republican Jim Sensenbrenner notched one when he asked Zuckerberg about why presidential son Donald Trump Jr.'s social media account was recently taken down for a short time over a controversial hydroxychloroquine video. But that controversy involved Trump's Twitter account, not Facebook.
The shorter version: Just because that one corner of the federal apparatus approved the deal some eight years ago doesn’t mean Zuckerberg is out of the woods. And deals that are made can be unmade. Some of the toughest queries came from Cicilline himself, on a topic that the chairman has been pursuing for many months now: whether Amazon uses the data of independent sellers on its platform to figure out how to best sell its own products. Bezos declined repeatedly to dig into the details, often arguing that he simply didn’t know the relevant information, even though it's common for CEOs to prep thoroughly for these sort of high-profile Q&As.
Some GOP lawmakers also explicitly rejected the idea that, as the oft-heard saying goes, “big is bad.”
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