Grilled by Lawmakers, Big Tech Turns Up the Gaslight

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Tim Cook of Apple all dodged lawmakers’ most pointed questions, or professed their ignorance. The result was a hearing that, at times, felt less like a reckoning than an attempted gaslighting — a group of savvy executives trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence that their yearslong antitrust investigation had dug up wasn’t really evidence of anything. The performance wasn’t particularly convincing. You don’t become a tech mogul by being sloppy or forgetful, and it strains credulity to imagine that these four hypercompetitive, detail-obsessed men — all of whom had many weeks to prepare for the hearing — simply didn’t remember major decisions they’d made.