The House Antitrust Committee will hear from the CEOs of Apple – Tim Cook, Amazon – Jeff Bezos, Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg, and Google – Sundar Pichai where they are expected to defend their companies before the House Antitrust Subcommittee today in a hearing that will make tech industry history, no matter what happens. This will be by far the most significant hearing since the antitrust against Microsoft in the late ‘90s.
Given that the tech giants are accustomed to answering to no one in particular, collecting four of them on a substantive topic is notable in its own right. Remarkably, Wednesday will mark the first time Amazon’s CEO has faced lawmakers in a public hearing — and they’re bound to have plenty of questions for the take-no-prisoners online retail behemoth.
For Apple and Cook, who prefer to stay above the public-facing political fray, it’s the first time before Congress in years. Facebook and Google have both been called to Congress more recently, but lawmakers have still barely scratched the surface of two companies that have completely reshaped modern life.
There are a lot of unknowns heading into the hearing. Will lawmakers extract any useful revelations or will it be five hours of “let us get back to you on that?” Could tech executives manage to be even more evasive now that they’re appearing remotely via video chat? Will some subcommittee members lead the hearing so far into off-topic territory that we learn nothing about the business practices that scaled an industry of market-owning giants? And most importantly: On a scale of one to supervillain, what kind of vibes will Bezos give off?
What time the Hearing will Commence
We hope to know the answers to all of these questions and more — possibly even a question from a lawmaker or two and if you’re interested in watching it go down yourself, you can tune into the livestream here today at 12PM ET (6PM South Africa, 5PM Nigeria).
How to Watch The Antitrust Hearing
The House Judiciary live-streams proceedings from the committee’s official YouTube page, so we expect a link to be posted there shortly before the hearing begins. Once the stream is available, we will update this post to include a direct link and an embed so that the hearing can be viewed from this page.
