Hey Congress, never lump Big Tech CEOs together again

Remember back in the 20th century when Congress held “big business” antitrust hearings with the CEOs of Standard Oil, Ford, U.S. Steel, IBM, and AT&T all testifying at the same time? No? That’s probably because it never happened. 

Despite the fact that all of those giant companies were accused of antitrust violations — and in two of those cases, forcibly broken up by the justice system — you just wouldn’t ever stick them in the same room. Their industries are too obviously different. Representatives would have to read up on oil, autos, metallurgy, computers, and telecoms. Try to tackle them all at the same time, and you’d dilute the effect of scrutinizing each one.   

And yet the 21st century equivalent of such a muddled hearing did actually happen on Wednesday. The House Judiciary’s subcommittee on antitrust stuck the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google together in the same room (well, the same WebEx virtual room) for around five hours. Evidence was presented that each one has acted like a monopoly, which they have… dominating retail, apps and hardware, the social media business, and search engines, respectively.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, introduced the four CEOs as “gatekeepers to the digital economy.” Which, in 2020, makes as much sense as calling them real estate barons because they all own vast server farms. They are, and also you’re missing the point. 

Digital is simply the water we all swim in now, especially now in a pandemic. These are four of the world’s largest and most influential companies, period. Their means of establishing monopoly power in their realms are diverse and complex (we wrote a neat cheat sheet here). They require individual scrutiny. 

The clueless lumping together of Big Tech was what allowed the committee’s unserious conservative members to turn much of a serious antitrust hearing into an irrelevant grievance session on “cancel culture.” It’s what allowed Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the committee’s ranking member and clearly its least prepared, to confuse Facebook with Twitter. To be clear, there is