It’s not often you’ll hear the CEOs of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook speak in the same room, but it’s happening today. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will appear in front of a congressional subcommittee to defend their business practices, which many have accused of unfairly stifling competition.
Rather than a witness table in Washington, the execs will line up to testify via videoconferencing, which will be broadcast online on House Judiciary’s official YouTube channel.
Members of House judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee have been investigating claims of unfair competitive practices and anti-consumer ruses against these tech giants for over a year. In that window, they’ve reviewed hundreds of hours of interviews and over 1.3 million documents about the companies.
The hearing represents perhaps the most significant probe into Big Tech’s dominance since the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 90s. In fact, The New York Times compared the event to tech’s “Big Tobacco moment.”
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The 15 members of the committee will have five minutes for each question, with the hearing expected to potentially stretch into the evening.
Among other things, the committee will interrogate Cook about Apple’s prohibitive App Store policies, Pichai about Google’s advertising monopoly, Bezos about Amazon’s role as both a retailer and a marketplace, and Zuckerberg about Facebook’s social network dominance.
Interestingly, news recently came to light that three of the lawmakers on the committee owned more than $100,000 worth of stocks in those companies.
In the meantime, the hearing is slated to take place at 12PM ET. There’s no scheduled livestream on the House Judiciary’s channel as of yet, but we’ll update this piece with the link once it starts.
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