By the time the subcommittee called the CEOs, it had amassed deep knowledge and uncovered a damning paper trail. With many of their questions, members seemed to know the inner workings of the companies better than their executives. Asking about anticompetitive practices, Cicilline reduced Googles Sundar Pichai to mumbling incoherently about kettlebells; using specific examples, the subcommittee members Pramila Jayapal and Joe Neguse prodded Amazons Jeff Bezos into admitting instances of his companys anticompetitive behavior.

Ever since the election of President Donald Trump, which revealed the rampant manipulation of social media, the backlash against Silicon Valley has often felt shapeless. Because these companies have tendrils extended into seemingly every aspect of American life, the complaints against them have sprawled. They have been criticized for an insensitivity to privacy, their role in the proliferation of misinformation, their cozy relationship with China, their creation of addictive products, their tax-avoidance schemes, and so on. With such a boundless litany of attacks, the companies have benefited from their critics failure to focus their arguments.

But where Zuckerberg suffered a barrage of disconnected complaints, these hearings got to the nub of the problem: The internet has allowed the creation of a new style of monopoly. Nobody escapes the pull of these dominant firms, which have the power to pick winners and losers, in both the economy and the realm of information. The long, familiar list of complaints about the tech giants was distilled to its most essential elementthe danger that concentrated market power poses to competitive capitalism and democracy.

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Like every other occasion in Trumps Washington, the hearings featured instances of partisan sniping. But what made the proceeding so distinctive is the broad agreement they evinced. Hardly any member was willing to defend the companies with anything close to conviction. Even when Trumps devoted defender Jim Jordan launched into conspiracy theories about how Google aims to strangle conservative opinion, he was mouthing a version of Cicillines argument. The companies, Jordan was saying, have become omnipotent gatekeepers with the power to invisibly shape the flow of information however they please.

Invoking a dusty name, several Democrats on the committee spoke reverently about the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who led the anti-monopoly movement of the early 20th century. By conjuring his ghost, they were aligning themselves with an older, more pugilistic strand of antitrust than has been practiced in Washington the past few generations. They were signaling a broader revolt against the long-dominant Chicago school of political economy, under which the governments worries about monopoly narrow to a standard called consumer welfare. In that paradigm, regulators and courts sought to punish only monopolies that raised prices, which meant that they rarely took any action at all. (And the standard seems antiquated in an era when many tech companies give their products to consumers for free.) But todays hearings represented a return to Brandeisian worries about corporate behemoths, about how they use their size to hurt small businesses, how concentrated economic power can so easily distort the functioning of democracy.

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The Tech Giants Are Dangerous, and Congress Knows It - The Atlantic