Is too much power concentrated in too few big tech companies? That’s the question that lawmakers on capitol hill are attempting to answer with this week’s anti-trust hearings, which kicked off Wednesday.
CEO’s from digital behemoths Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all facing tough questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee, but Wednesday’s exchange between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) garnered significant attention from media outlets for the Ohio congressman’s inquiries into Google’s alleged liberal bias.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced an onslaught of questions from Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who seemed concerned that Google will skew its search engine results to give preference in the November election to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, compared with President Trump.
Jordan asked Pichai to offer assurances that Google will not favor Biden in search results during the 2020 election.
“We view both campaign strategies and political ads as an important part of free speech in a democratic society and engage with campaigns according to law and approach the work in a non-patrician way,” Pichai said.
Jordan again asked Pichai if he could assure Americans that Google will not tailor features in any way to specifically help one candidate over another.
“We won’t do any work to politically tilt anything in one way or another,” Pichai replied. “It’s against our core values.”
WIBC host Tony Katz:
“One of the big problems with these kinds of hearings is that the people conducting them have no idea what Sundar Pichai does. Do you think they understand the inner workings of the systems and algorithms at Google? Do you think they really understand the marketing capacity and influence of Facebook? Of course not. How could they? They have no way of being able to follow this. But what is true is that they are indeed censoring people on the political right. That is a fact. And to deny that is to stick your head in the sand.”
Click below to hear Tony’s full commentary:
