Tech Giant CEOs Grilled By Congress Over Shady Business Practices

Via America's Lawyer: Big tech leaders from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google appear at the center of congressional hearings focused on whether these companies are stifling competition and free speech. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Last week CEO's from Amazon, Facebook and several other tech giants appeared before a House panel to defend their business practices and answer some really tough questions. Joining me to talk about that is Farron Cousins from trial lawyer magazine. Farron, you know, as I watched this, I was surprised at one thing. It was almost, it was almost a bilateral kind of attack on these folks, wasn't it?

It was and, you know, occasionally, it is nice to see them actually working together, especially against this particular industry. This is one that Congress, you know, the federal government at every level has allowed to run rampant for, for 20 years almost when a lot of these companies were first getting started. And now they're trying to play catch up. And I think that's part of the reason we see Congress kind of uniting together against this because they let these, these giants now, grow and grow and grow and absorb every piece of competition along the way, or crush every piece of competition along the way. And now suddenly they're staring down these behemoths because they didn't address it at the time.

Okay. So we've got a $5 trillion business. That's what, this is $5 trillion. You've got what's been described as a digital railroad problem. What that means is we've always handled antitrust cases against the railroad, against the steel industry. We're not afraid to go, in the past, we have not been afraid to go after antitrust cases. This department of justice has failed to do it and the reason is these folks are spending so much. They're, they're just spreading so much money around. You know, the easiest thing to me is to go after them on, just absolutely say, look, your 230 right, your chapter 230 right is gone. Take it from there.

Yeah, absolutely. And for anybody who's not familiar with the 230 protection, says that any of these giants specifically, really though the social media ones, Facebooks, Twitter, LinkedIn's, they're not responsible for anything that gets posted on their website. So if you go on there and you say something horrible, you issue threats, the platform itself faces no liability over allowing you to say that. And this is actually, this goes back to Bill Clinton's telecommunications act. They included that as part of the telecommunications act that Bill Clinton signed into law. And a lot of what we're seeing right now.

It was a gift.

Right.

It was take care of me, I'm Bill Clinton and I'm going to give this to you, which is crazy.

Well, and that's a lot of the problems we see with these giants does stem from the Clinton administration. When he deregulated further the media industry, it included these soon to be giants.

Okay, let's talk about that just a second. Clinton comes in, I swear to you, it was about Clinton and the Democrats, and we're going to get all this favorable press if we do these things. So what did they do? And go back to 19, what was it, 1980. I think there were almost sixty different independent news medias that, that covered the entire country. Now it's down to three. Okay. That's where it led us. So this is, they're looking at the same thing here. You're looking at this, this, at this machine that appears to be above the law. I mean, we can, they can just do whatever they, they create this nanny, you know, we now have this new nanny momentum. We're going to decide what you can read and what you can't read. If we find it offensive, you can't read it. We're going to censor it. This is out of control. And I was shocked not to see warm and fuzzy Jack from Twitter, not on that, weren't you?

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