Thread by @zGuz

Grading the opening statements from Zuck, Bezos, Cook and Pichai in today's House antitrust hearing, a thread:

Jeff Bezos is appearing before Congress for the first time and his prepared statement is making up for lost time clocking in at an amazing 8 pages

-1 for violating Strunk & White’s 17th rule. Brevity.

Bezos also says curbside pickup at Walmart is a threat to Amazon and touts Walmart’s 74% online sales growth. Amazon is still number 1.
-1 for touting a competitor

Bezos immediately follows by saying Amazon was among the first retailers to pay a $15 minimum wage. Applauds Target and Best Buy for following. Doesn’t mention Walmart, which hasn’t.
+1 for subtweet

Bezos, the world’s richest man, also seeks pity points with a story of Amazon shares falling from $116 to $6 in the tech bubble. At $3,000 now, I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul
-4

Bezos closes with the fact his dad is a Cuban immigrant. Would be pandering if not for this truth “Immigrants like my dad see what a treasure this country is—they have perspective and can often see it even more clearly than those of us who were lucky enough to be born here.”
+1

Sundar Pichai opens by mentioning he grew up in India without a computer, basically upstaging Bezos’ one-degree removed immigrant story.
Savage +1

Flexing Google’s FREE tools, Pichai stumbles with this weird example of Google Analytics, which allows people “to track the effectiveness of their marketing spend.”

It’s free to track how much you spend!
-2

Pichai says this about searching for info: ”You can ask Alexa a question from your kitchen; read your news on Twitter; ask friends for information via WhatsApp; and get recommendations on Snapchat or Pinterest.”

Getting life advice from Snap leads you to a dark place
-1

It’s been a bit since Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared before congress, so he takes a while to hit form but offers this gem: “Apple does not have a dominant market share in any market where we do business.”

iPhone is 45.5% of the smartphone mkt

-1

Cook also says this about Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases: “App Store developers set prices for their apps and never pay for shelf space.”

Technically shelves don’t exist in a digital world, but then again they kinda do
-1

Zuck is a vet in front of congress, which is why it’s surprising to see his statement come in at 5 pages that almost say “if you’re going to take my time, I’m going to take your time.”

Zuck says this about FB: “We believe in values - democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression - that the American economy was built on.”
Bold statement at an antirust hearing
-1

Zuck also size shames congress: “As I understand our laws, companies aren’t bad just because they are big.”

AKA Don’t break us cause u ain’t us.
+1

OVERALL OPENING STATEMENT SCORE:

BEZOS: -4
PICHAI: -2
COOK: -2
ZUCK: +1

Could be anyone’s game as we hit questioning, especially with a newcomer in the world’s richest man…

Rep. Jim Jordan going on a rant about Twitter "censoring" conservatives during a hearing with Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple is not a great use of time

Congress gets the heads of the richest companies in the world on one call, including the world's richest man, and this is the shot we get

HEAD FAKE: Zuck submitted the longest opening statement for the record, but was the only one among the #BigTech CEOs to go that far under the 5 minute mark:

Zuck: 4:42
Bezos: 5:05
Cook: 5:07
Pichai: ~ 5:00

Ranking member Jim Sensenbrenner just asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg why Donald Trump Jr.'s Twitter account was suspended for promoting hydroxychloroquine

This hearing is off to a great start

Nadler lands a solid flurry of punches on Zuck buying Instagram as a move to eliminate a competitor in violation of antitrust laws:

Zuck: "It was not a guarantee that Instagram was going to succeed,” calling it an American success story + adds the FTC found no issue then

Did Rep. Greg Steube just put his dad on blast for moving his campaign emails to the spam folder?

FINALLY at nearly 2.5 hours into the antitrust hearing, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon becomes the first to bring up Amazon's acquisition of Diapers .com and how price cutting tactics could be exclusionary conduct to squash a competitor

Bezos sneaks by on the ol "don't remember" play
+1

Pressing on his proposed legislation to eliminate slave labor, Rep. Buck gets Pichai to bend first to explicitly agree to prevent products that use slave labor to sell on Big Tech platforms

Cook stopped short, the rest caved after Pichai explicitly agreed

+1 Pichai