ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
How big is too big? That's the question at the heart of a hearing on Capitol Hill today.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Four of America's top tech executives appeared before the House Judiciary Committee - Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai. They were asked whether their companies are monopolies that harm consumers.
SHAPIRO: Here's Democratic Congressman David Cicilline.
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DAVID CICILLINE: The evidence seems very clear to me. As Google became the gateway to the Internet, it began to abuse its power. It used its surveillance over Web traffic to identify competitive threats and crush them.
CHANG: The hearing was seasoned with pandemic flavor.
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CICILLINE: Excuse me. I'm going to remind members of this committee, unless you are speaking, our rules require you to wear a mask, according to the attending physician. No, I'm speaking about another member of this committee.
SHAPIRO: And GOP Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner wanted the tech CEOs to answer for this.
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JIM SENSENBRENNER: As we know, companies like Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter have become the public square today where political debate unfolds in real time, but reports that dissenting views, often conservative views, are targeted or censored is seriously troubling. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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