Big Tech Goes to Washington Wednesday

Ahead of the recently rescheduled blockbuster congressional hearing Wednesday with the chief executives of Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., senior House Judiciary aides told reporters last week that the hearing — which will feature all four executives calling in virtually — will be laser-focused on the 1.3 million documents of evidence and roughly 385 hours of phone calls, briefings and meetings that have been poured into the antitrust subcommittee’s 13-month investigation into competition issues in the tech sector.

According to Morning Consult, some Republican lawmakers appear to have a different agenda, with a spokesperson for one GOP member of the antitrust subcommittee, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), saying the congressman still plans to focus on allegations of anti-conservative bias on online platforms and censorship of such speech. And a Republican aide told Morning Consult that GOP lawmakers don’t have a “tight road map” for questioning and will ask about a mix of antitrust and censorship issues.

“In the era of big tech and social media, our freedom of speech is more important now than ever,” said Carson Steelman, a spokeswoman for Steube’s office. “It is crucial that our voices are not silenced and tech providers do not unfairly censor or editorialize content just because they disagree with the underlying politics.”

With the four CEOs — Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg — appearing on the panel at the same time, concerns have been raised about how effectively the lawmakers can dig into each of the alleged anti-competitive practices raised against their companies. And although senior aides expressed confidence in the panel’s ability to stay focused on competition matters, the hearing risks being muddled by a competing aim favored by some Republican lawmakers.

How lawmakers regulate technology companies hasn’t been a particularly high priority for the public this year. In Morning Consult/Politico surveys conducted throughout 2020 among roughly 2,000 registered voters, the share who said regulating tech should be either “a top priority” or “an important, but lower priority” remained steady at about 50 percent — roughly 20 to 35 percentage points lower than support for issues such as controlling the spread of COVID-19, stimulating the economy to recover from the pandemic, passing a health care bill and reducing the federal budget.

In a survey conducted July 10-12, Democratic voters were slightly more supportive of Congress making tech regulation a priority (58 percent) than Republican voters (52 percent). While the same share of Democrats showed interest in tech reform in a January survey on the topic, GOP voters are now 9 percentage points more likely since the beginning of the year to voice support for congressional regulation of tech companies.