THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 55
had studied the role Congress had
played during earlier eras, when there
were crackdowns on corporate mal-
feasance. “They would bring in the
C.E.O.s and produce these multi-
volume records,” she told me. “It played
an important function in keeping both
members of Congress and the broader
public educated about how these in-
dustries were operating.”
In July, 2019, the F.T.C., led by a
Trump appointee named Joseph Si-
mons, announced that it had fined
Facebook five billion dollars and im-
posed new restrictions on the com-
pany for violating the 2012 settlement
it had signed with the commission
over privacy violations. The new pen-
alty was in part a response to the Cam-
bridge Analytica scandal, and it was
designed to make headlines. The fine
was the largest in the F.T.C.’s record,
and a press release conveyed the agen-
cy’s satisfaction with what it had ac-
complished: “If you’ve ever wondered
what a paradigm shift looks like, you’re
witnessing one today.” To critics of
Big Tech, however, the fine only un-
derscored what they had come to
regard as the F.T.C.’s failure to penal-
ize bad behavior. Once again, no in-
dividuals at the company were pun-
ished. The F.T.C.’s three Republican
commissioners had voted to approve
the settlement, while the two Dem-
ocratic commissioners, Chopra and
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, voted against
it. Chopra issued a blistering dissent;
Facebook had likely generated more
than five billion dollars in revenue
from the misconduct, and the agree-
ment included immunity for Face-
book executives for all “known” and
“unknown” violations. “Facebook’s fla-
grant violations were a direct result
of their business model of mass sur-
veillance and manipulation, and this
action blesses this model,” he wrote
in a tweet. “The settlement does not
fix this problem.”
Two months later, Cicilline’s sub-
committee started asking for internal
data from Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
and Alphabet about how the compa-
nies operated their profits and expenses,
internal company correspondence about
acquisitions, and other information.
It also sent requests to firms that had
done business with the big four, to learn
more about how they behaved. Inde-
pendent businesses tended to be reli-
ant on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and
Apple, in order to communicate with
their customers and sell their products.
Cicilline’s team described the big four
as “gatekeepers” that dictated how other
firms could operate. They discovered
that leaders of companies were afraid
of speaking out against any of the dom-
inant tech firms, especially Amazon,
and worried that their coöperation with
the investigation would become pub-
lic. The companies understood that
Amazon could block them from doing
business on its site, a tactic that Ama-
zon had used in 2014, during the
e-book-pricing dispute, when it re-
moved books published by Hachette
from its Web site.
During the next year, the subcom-
mittee held a series of hearings on in-
novation, privacy, and how the major
technology platforms had affected the
news media. The most high-profile
hearing was scheduled for July, 2020,
when Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Tim
Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg, the
C.E.O.s, respectively, of Amazon, Al-
phabet, Apple, and Facebook, were in-
vited to testify. A congressional staffer
involved in the investigation said that,in the past, the hearings of congres-
sional committees were typically “asym-
metrical warfare.” The staffer said, “The
witnesses were prepped literally every
day for a month before the hearing.
You’d ruin their summer, and the
members would show up and just ask
the questions prepared for them by
their staff.”
When Zuckerberg testified in 2018,
in the aftermath of the Cambridge An-
alytica scandal, several members of Con-
gress demonstrated complete ignorance
of how Facebook worked. Senator Orrin
Hatch, of Utah, asked how the com-
pany made money without charging its
users any fees. Zuckerberg smiled and
replied, “Senator, we run ads.”
The 2020 hearing was different.
Khan and her colleagues had spent sev-
eral months assembling research and
interviewing witnesses for the House
members on the Judiciary Subcommit-
tee who would be questioning the
C.E.O.s. They had internal e-mails
and chat logs from Facebook, includ-
ing a discussion among executives about
buying Instagram in order to eliminate
it as a competitor.
Cicilline opened the proceedings
from the congressional hearing room.
Before the pandemic, he noted, the“I can’t tell whether you’ve had too much or not enough.”