The chief executives of four American tech giants faced accusations of wielding their companies’ size to unfairly squash competition on Wednesday, as they sat for an unprecedented grilling from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai of Google’s parent company Alphabet were told their companies had “too much power”.
The executives, by contrast, planned to use the hearing to paint their companies — which have a combined market value of $5tn — as “uniquely American” success stories, directly creating more than 1m jobs in the country and enabling the prosperity of small and medium-sized businesses.