Tech competitors are ‘blown away’ by Congress’ CEO grilling and hopeful for antitrust reform

congressional hearing
congressional hearing

As the Congress grilled the CEOs of the Big 4 tech companies, David Hansson was sporting quite a broad smile on his face. The co-founder of Basecamp declared he was quite blown away with the proceedings had unfurled. In fact, he had expected a lukewarm event at most which would be reminiscent of the congressional hearing with Mark Zuckerberg that left a bad taste in the mouth.

Hansson had previously testified before the Congress about the impact the big 4 tech companies had on recent startups. But even he wasn’t prepared for the storm that raged on the four companies Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai as the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust brought out 1.3 million pieces of evidence that had been collected against these companies in the last one year.

Yelp’s founder Luther Lowe, the principal opposition of Google felt the same way too. “What [Congress] do[es] is they send signals,” Lowe said in an interview Thursday. “If the signal in … 2011 was, ‘Hey, FTC investigating Google, why are you messing with this great company,’ the message yesterday was, ‘Why didn’t you go after these companies [earlier]?’”

And this time around, Congress was well-informed of the situation at hand.

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