Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais Evan Vu/Associated PressIt’s summer—must be time to grill a few CEOs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai will appear Wednesday (virtually, how fitting!) before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. It’s tech success vs. lawyers and career politicians who probably have an aide print out their emails. Broadway is closed, so this will be must-see theater.
The CEOs’ task is to disarm, dissuade and dissipate. No need to upstage congressmen, who are playing a weak hand. Antitrust is driven by consumer harm. Sure, there are screw-ups: Amazon favors its own products, Apple its own apps, Google its own YouTube videos; Facebook collects too much personal data. Yet none of these habits necessarily harm consumers and all could be easily fixed without decadeslong antitrust inquisitions. Lawyers are taught: “If you have facts on your side, hammer the facts. If you don’t, hammer the table.” Expect loud table banging.
Mr. Zuckerberg should play up consumer benefit: “Chairman [David] Cicilline, 85.7% of registered voters in your Rhode Island district use Facebook for over an hour every day.” Get him thinking: Would they vote for Facebook over me? Questions will fly about an advertiser boycott over “hate speech and divisive content”— Disney recently joined Starbucks, Ford, Unilever and Verizon. But branded advertising doesn’t really work on Facebook, hence brands are saving money by boycotting. Zuck must think: We don’t need these Mickey Mouse outfits.
Facebook is a small-business platform, and a critical one. Millions of companies rely on it to sell products locally and often nationally. Mr. Zuckerberg should ask: “Are you against small businesses? Is this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but I for one am not going to stand here and listen to you bad mouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!” That last part was Otter in “Animal House,” but you get the point.
On the other hand, Amazon should demand praise—like when you ask the annoying Parisian waiter, “Do you speak German?” and as he sputters “Non” you say, “You’re welcome.” Mr. Bezos’ job is simple: “Congressman, have you watched ‘House of Cards’?” (They all have.) “You’re welcome. Netflix uses Amazon servers. So does Zoom. Did you get your next-day delivery of that 6-quart Instant Pot? You’re welcome.” Lockdowns would have been undoable without Amazon Prime.
Google and Apple can talk about similar mobile lifelines to consumers, anonymized data tracking movement trends, and their work on contact tracing through smartphones. Google has heat maps for searches for “fever.”
Again, stick with facts. Don’t be Jack Dorsey. During 2018 testimony, the Twitter CEO swore up and down that the site didn’t “shadow ban,” or stop certain users, mainly on the political right, from trending or showing up in searches. Twitter’s algorithms, he claimed, were merely tracking “behavioral signals.”
Then—whoops—hackers last week accessed the accounts of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama and others, and released screenshots showing a “secret admin panel.” Twitter hasn’t denied the images were real and quickly took them down. The panel has buttons for “Trends Blacklist” and “Search Blacklist”—the definition of shadow banning. It makes Mr. Dorsey’s denials sound fact-challenged at best. Maybe that’s why he said he plans to work from Africa. So his fellow CEOs should stick with facts. Heck, plead the Fifth—that would at least make the hearing memorable!
Disarm. Check. Dissuade. Check. But how do you dissipate? Easy—when asked about hate speech, just challenge Congress to define it and say you’d be happy to get rid of it. Maybe Congress will rise to the challenge, but the Supreme Court would inevitably rule whatever they came up with violates the First Amendment.
Tech companies are being beaten up for their size and success. That’s just envy. Eventually competition—especially from each other—and the next wave of cool technology will topple them.
Listen closely and you may hear rumblings of the antitrust “theory of competitive harm.” That theory abandons any hard proof of consumer harm and holds, for example, that Facebook can be broken up merely because its purchase of Instagram prevented a competitor from emerging. Even squishier is the “New Brandeis School” and, get this, “Hipster Antitrust,” which say the purpose of antitrust is to help solve inequality and other social ills. That sounds like hammering the table, not facts. Meanwhile, I for one am not going to stand here . . .
Write to kessler@wsj.com.
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