Government
Next Monday, the CEO’s of four of the most dominant and important technology companies in the world will testify to Congress: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook will all appear before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on anti-trust, commercial and administrative law. My guest today is the congressman who is going to chair and run that hearing, Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island. A Democrat, Cicilline has been in Congress for the last decade, and before that was mayor of Providence for eight years. He was the first openly gay major of a U.S. State capital. For the last year Cicilline has been holding hearings on the issue of regulating big tech, and this hearing Monday will be the last hearing his subcomittee holds before they release a report with recommendations for Congress and for regulatory agencies in the executive branch. Cicilline told me he hopes to have this report out by late August, and when I asked if the regulations they’re going to recommend could be implemented next year — if Joe Biden were to win the presidency — he said he would expect them to. "There's no reason to not expect a new administration to take this up in their first year," he said. "I think it's pretty clear we don't have real competition, partly because of the size of these platforms, and partly because of the fact that they have essentially been unregulated." Outro music: "Under Control" by The Internet
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