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I'm live tweeting today's big House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing featuring the CEOs of Apple, Google. Facebook, and Amazon.

That is, if the committee can fix its technical issues and actually get the hearing started. You can watch along! https://www.c-span.org/video/?474236-1/heads-facebook-amazon-apple-google-testify-antitrust-law&live

In a fitting scene, all four Big Tech CEOs will be offering testimony through a video conferencing service instead of sitting for in-person questions.

We're going to see a lot of Matt Gaetz yelling at computer screens about why Twitter won't verify his friends.

What should you expect from today's Big Tech hearing? A lot!

This is ostensibly a hearing about whether Silicon Valley is getting too powerful and running afoul of federal antitrust laws. But expect questions on data security, Russian misinformation campaigns & account hacking.

While we wait, let's discuss the over/under on at least one of the four tech CEOs dropping from the hearing due to connectivity issues. Who will it be?

We'll regroup here at 1pm, when the House Antitrust Committee finally gets its shit together and starts this weird hearing.

The hearing has begun!

I can't tell if the audio issues are only on my end, but it's amusing listening to Chairman @RepCicilline delivering his opening remarks through an insane auto-tuner.

. @RepCicilline lays out the risks posed by Big Tech in his opener:

1. They're gatekeepers over major chunks of online life.

2. They've used their power to surveil competitors and impede competition.

3. They're abusing their platform preference their products over others.

CICILLINE: "This investigation goes to the heart of whether we the people govern ourselves," or whether we cede that right to powerful technology monopolies.

"These companies have the power to pick winners and losers, shake down competitors and harm consumers."

Ranking Member @JimPressOffice is up now. He's bringing up the data security and data use arguments that will underpin much of this hearing:

"What responsibilities do companies have to share data with their customers? Or competitors? What is the fair market value of [data]?"

SENSENBRENNER: "As we know, companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter have become the public square of today...but reports that dissenting views, often conservative views, are targeted or censored is seriously troubling. Conservatives are consumers too."

You can tell Jim Jordan isn't on this committee because no one is shouting and everyone is wearing a suit jacket like an adult person.

. @RepJerryNadler is up!

"There is growing evidence a handful of corporations have captured an outsize portion of search and ecommerce...these dominant platforms now comprise the essential infrastructure of the 21st Century."

Nadler's use of the phrase "essential infrastructure" isn't a coincidence - there's a growing push among Democrats (led by @ewarren) to regulate Big Tech as a utility. Nadler's opening remarks show Warren's idea is still popular in the House. https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c

NADLER: "Across the economy, businesses live in fear of exclusion from these platforms - a fact many business owners have shared with this committee during the course of our investigation."

GOP will be focusing on censorship while Dems talk about fair competition.

Oh Lord, Jim Jordan finally showed up and he's wearing the only blue shirt he owns.

I would happily transcribe Jordan's ranting about how Big Tech is out to silence conservatives, but honestly the guy talks so fast and interrupts his own sentences so it's a nightmare to write this in real-time.

Shorter Jim Jordan: Why is Big Tech so mean to Donald Trump?

The thrust of Jim Jordan's monologue here seems to be that when social media companies enforce their Terms of Service against Republicans, that's unconscionable censorship.

JORDAN is now accusing Twitter of secretly shilling for the Ayatollah in Iran.

It baffles me how conservatives can look at Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan - two of the whiniest people I've ever fucking seen - and see a couple of macho warriors against Snowflake Culture.

I believe each witness at today's hearing has multiple, muted backup lines in this conference call in the event anyone loses connection. Neat.

This is horrible to display on a TV, though. Which is good for the tech CEOs and bad for Congress.

. @JeffBezos speaking now at the House Antitrust Hearing notes 80% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Amazon. The only groups Americans like more? Doctors and the military, he says.

This is the beginning of Amazon's argument that consumers aren't harmed by its monopoly.

I would like Jeff Bezos to never say "tiniest sip of the elixir" again in my life thanks

Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivering his opening now. Both Pichai and Bezos have defended their sprawling tech monopolies on the same grounds:

- How many jobs they create
- How much money they add to the economy
- How bad things will get if Congress dares to regulate them

Apple CEO Tim Cook is up now. He's easily the most comfortable with the challenge of charming lawmakers, and he shows it by opening with a brief eulogy for the late Rep. John Lewis.

Don't expect Cook to walk in line with Bezos and Pichai - he's much better at this than them.

COOK: "We know consumers have choices...our goal is the best, not the most. In fact, we don't have a majority market share in any industry where we do business."

While Bezos and Pichai are arguing they are *good* monopolies, Cook is clearly arguing Apple is *not* a monopoly.

COOK: "If Apple is a gatekeeper, what we've done is open the gate wider. We want to get every app we can on the store, not keep them off."

ZUCKERBERG is up and making the strange argument that even if Facebook is a monopoly, all the other Big Tech monopolies are more dangerous than Zuck's.

Zuckerberg says "we fight hard, we want to be the best, I was taught those were the values that matter in this country," explicitly wrapping Facebook's destructive misinformation platform in the American flag.

Hey it's question time let's watch everything go to hell in the House of Representatives!

If these Big Tech companies are doing as well as their CEOs are claiming, why are none of them paying any federal taxes?

CICILLINE: "The evidence we collected showed Google...stole restaurant reviews from Yelp to bootstrap its own local search business. Do you know how Google responded when Yelp asked you to stop stealing their reviews? They threatened to delist them."

PICHAI avoids the Yelp question entirely: "We conduct ourselves with the highest standards."

. @RepCicilline came prepared for today's hearing with reams of recent studies and watchdog investigations into Google's abuse of smaller businesses.

For the most part, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat in silence. What little he said was meaningless boilerplate.

SENSENBRENNER is up, and he's only interested in how social media platforms are finally labeling @GOP misinformation.

Asks Zuck what he's doing to make conservative safe spaces: "We've distinguished ourselves as one of the companies that defends free expression the most."

Zuckerberg didn't choose that "defends free expression" phrase by chance. That framing is popular among the Parler set, folks like Donald Trump Jr., and is intended to buy Facebook some legitimacy with skeptical Republicans.

SENSENBRENNER is absolutely perplexed about why social media companies are banning misinformation about Hydroxychloroquine.

Then he confuses Twitter for Facebook and asks Zuck why he banned Donald Trump Jr. for touting snake oil.

SENSENBRENNER: "Isn't it up to somebody else to say hey, this isn't true, rather than have Twitter or Facebook take it down?

ZUCK: "I agree with you - we don't want to become arbiters of truth...hydroxychloroquine is not proven to treat COVID."

NADLER steps up and we're back to exploring Big Tech's practice of buying up small competitors to stifle competition.

Nadler asks Zuckerberg about Instagram. Zuck says he considers Instagram - which Facebook owns - as a market competitor.

NADLER: "What did you mean when you said the purpose of the [Instagram] deal was to neutralize a competitor?"

ZUCK: "I've been clear Instagram was a competitor...by having them join us, they went from being a competitor to an app we could help grow and get more people to use."

Zuckerberg walked right into it.

NADLER reminds Zuckerberg, who just admitted he purchased Instagram because it was a competitor, that those types of mergers and acquisitions are federal antitrust violations. Zuck responds that no one complained at the time.

It's remarkable to me that the media portrays Mark Zuckerberg as some kind of brain genius yet he doesn't notice the giant red lights leading him into the simplest trap of all time.

CICILLINE: "I would remind the witness that the rulings of the FTC in 2012" do not impact potential new antitrust proceedings by Congress.

Joel Kaplan, Zuckerberg's Washington whisperer and a @GOP stalwart, must be fuming right now.

GOP @RepKenBuck is going with the bold new "actually, monopolies are good for America" argument.

Buck's only beef with Google is that they backed out of a military contract and he thinks they should apologize to the troops or something.

BUCK is surprisingly bringing up the case of Google stealing content from Genius, flatly accusing Pichai of "stealing what you don't want to create yourself."

Buck accuses Google of following "China's corporate espionage playbook" to undermine competitors.

Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg are not having great days, that's for sure.

. @RepHankJohnson asks Apple about their gatekeeping in the App Store. He asks Tim Cook to confirm Apple is the sole decision maker on what gets in.

COOK: "The app store is a feature of the iPhone, just like the camera is...if it's a native app, yes sir. If it's a web app, no."

JOHNSON: "Developers have no choice but to go along with the changes [in Apple's terms] or leave the app store. Yet the rules are changed to benefit Apple and discriminate against developers in the app store."

Tim Cook is doing by far the best job in parrying attempts by lawmakers to pin anticompetitive behavior on Apple. Not sure Rep. Johnson landed a single meaningful hit on Cook during this extended exchange on competition in the App Store.

Guys I just realized "App" is also the first part of Apple.

JOHNSON pushes Tim Cook on what stops him from raising fees in the app store at will to bully competition.

COOK: "We've never raised the price since the first day...there's fierce competition for developers among app stores...I'd describe it as a street fight for market share."

Tim Cook says bullying is against Apple's company culture, which is hilarious if you have even a basic knowledge of Apple's corporate history.

Oh boy we've got full frontal @mattgaetz and he starts off by asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai why he hates American soldiers.

GAETZ: "Will you take the pledge that Google will not adopt the bigoted anti-police policy" of platforming anyone who criticizes cops.

As a matter of principle I'm not going to dedicate more than one tweet to anything Matt Gaetz says.

All right friends I know Jim Jordan is coming up so now is a great time to take a break and finish this column @harrysiegel is politely reminding me about.

AND WE'RE BACK FOLKS

@RepJayapal is questioning Jeff Bezos right now about the huge amounts of data Amazon employees can harvest on competitors through the Amazon platform - and then deploy it against competitors by releasing similar products.

We have @RepGregSteube up now who I honest to God have never heard of before today.

Steube is complaining that Google was secretly preventing him from finding Gateway Pundit articles when he searches Google, which is something.

Rep. Steube doesn't understand that if he's using two different devices with two different Google accounts, the targeted content he's served will look different on each device.

Steube spun his ignorance into a global conspiracy against Gateway Pundit.

It shows you how narrow the @GOP worldview is that Democrats are asking questions about making the economy more competitive and building stronger data policies, while Republicans are asking the CEO of Google why they aren't getting Gateway Pundit emails on their tablet.

DEMINGS is doing a great job undermining Google CEO Pichai's claims that Google is just a platform. "80% of Google's revenue came from ad sales," @RepValDemings notes.

Whatever Google might do in public, its lifeblood is advertising sales.

Jim Jordan is up now and his first question is a demand that Google makes a public pledge not to help Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

Pichai says Google hasn't found any evidence it tilts campaigns one way or the other, and says they certainly won't in 2020.

Jordan's argument about policing pro-Democratic bias completely contradicts his earlier argument.

If these are private companies who should be allowed to run their business how they think best, as Jordan says, why *couldn't* they decide to endorse a candidate?

PEOPLE JIM JORDAN SAYS ARE SHILLING FOR CHINA
A LIST

Basically everyone

It has been nearly four years since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election and she's still living rent free in Jim Jordan's head.

. @RepMGS comes in with a haymaker on Jim Jordan: "I'd like to direct your attention to antitrust law instead of fringe conspiracy theories."

Jordan freaks out. Another member yells, "Put on your mask!" as Jordan starts shouting.

SCANLON is bringing up details of what Amazon did to weaken and ultimately "take out" http://Diapers.com , an ecommerce competitor.

"In one month alone, Amazon was willing to bleed over $200 million in losses" in order to underprice and crush http://Diapers.com 

SCANLON: "After buying your leading competitor, Amazon cut promotions like http://Amazon.mom  and the discounts it used to lure customers from http://Diapers.com ." Then, tellingly, Amazon raised prices.

BEZOS: "I don't remember," says it was 10 years ago.

So far @RepCicilline and @RepMGS have asked some of the most insightful, probing questions of these Big Tech CEOs. Their questions explored actual examples of clear anticompetitive behavior on the part of Amazon and Facebook - stories most Americans have never heard before.

You can tell Zuckerberg is still stinging from that run-in with Nadler, who baited Zuckerberg into admitting Facebook's acquisition of Instragram might have violated antitrust law.

@RepJoeNeguse is pushing Zuck on its chain of acquisitons and Zuck isn't feeling chatty.

Wow. @RepJoeNeguse reads an email written by Zuckerberg where Zuck outlines the purpose of Facebook's aggressive acquisitions: to put Facebook in such a dominant market position that even Google starts to buckle.

. @RepLucyMcBath is sharing the story of a mother and small business owner targeted by Amazon with bullying, anticompetitive tactics.

This comes after Jeff Bezos claimed that the vast majority of communities and merchants love working with Amazon.

MCBATH: "Is this an appropriate way to treat someone?"

BEZOS: "No, Congresswoman. It's not the systematic approach we take, I can assure you. I don't even understand it. I'd like to understand it."

MCBATH takes issue with Bezos' claims that merchants have many options to sell their products if they don't like Amazon. She points out that Amazon is a giant compared to all other marketplaces.

BEZOS: "There are more and more [marketplaces] every day."

I don't tend to tweet out the grandstanding speeches both parties tend to give during hearings, so that's why things tend to move slower on this feed.

CICILLINE has been grilling Bezos on its culture of bullying and harassment, which Bezos has flatly denied multiple times despite media reports and investigations confirming many allegations.

I'm just not sure how much this achieves from a policymaking standpoint.

. @GOP Ranking Member SENSENBRENNER opens by saying he has already decided there is no problem with the current antitrust law. His interest, as usual, is in why social media companies are being so mean to our great president.

It shows how far behind Republicans - and even some Democrats - are in the tech debate that Sensenbrenner is comparing Amazon and Facebook's situation to that faced by AT&T and the telecoms in the 80s.

The situation is nothing alike: not in scale, not in power, not in influence

SENSENBRENNER argues it's dumb to update our century-old antitrust laws because that would mean all the lawyers and judges would have to learn new laws and that would be confusing.

These @GOP cranks have no business in Congress. They don't even believe in making laws.

. @RepJayapal is back with some more questions, asking if Facebook has ever talked about cloning a company as a way of weakning them ahead of a predatory acquisiton.

ZUCK: "I've said many times we were competing in the space of mobile cameras with Instagram."

Immediately after saying under oath that he never used cloned programs to pressure smaller companies into acquisiton by Facebook, @RepJayapal offers a list of people Zuckerberg's company threatened in exactly that way.

Zuck is not having a great day here.

Never thought I'd hear Ken Buck say "pop sockets"

A bipartisan line of criticism aimed at Bezos/Amazon has been how Amazon gains a huge volume of data about companies that do business on Amazon's platform - and there are clear examples of Amazon using that data to hobble potential competitors.

@RepKenBuck digging in on this

BUCK: "Will you certify here today that your company does not use and will never use slave labor to manufacture your products, or allow products to be sold on your platform that use slave labor."

COOK: [Won't say yes]
PICHAI: [Won't say yes]
BEZOS: Yes
ZUCK: "Won't tolerate it"

A rare moment of bipartisan harmony as Democratic @RepRaskin congratulates @GOP @RepKenBuck on a great line of questioning.

To dig a little deeper, only Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a definitive "yes" to @RepKenBuck's question about whether they woud unequivocally ban suppliers and products that utilize slave labor.

Amazon has plenty of slave labor in its supply chain: https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/apple-amazon-sony-samsung-uighur-forced-labor-china/

RASKIN: "Has Amazon's Alexa ever been trained to recommend non-Amazon products?"

BEZOS: "We do promote our own products, that's pretty common in business, so it wouldn't surprise me if Alexa sometimes promote sour own products.

Next up we have Matt Gaetz performing for Donald Trump and firing conspiracies into the air. So here's a picture of the kitty!

That's not what it means to beg the question, Gaetz.

Little known fact: @RealDonaldTrump sends Matt Gaetz $10 every time Gaetz says "Make America Great Again" during a hearing.

Looks like this hearing will be going into a third round of questioning - without objection from the members of Congress who seem to be enjoying slapping Google around.

I'm cutting it off here, sadly, because I can't take anymore and my eyes are bleeding some kind of weird black goo.

Let me know if the CEO of Google ever tells me why all the Qanon emails end up in my spam folder.

And thank you to the few of you who stuck around to read this little live-tweet! It's always fun to go back to my Hill roots.

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