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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why everyone gets so excited of this dog and pony show. The executives show up before congress, they get grilled with a bunch of questions, but what is the real change that comes out of this process?

I could certainly be very wrong, but this just seems like a circus act. Everyone is going to express their outrage but will there be an real change?

Will Apple have its 30% cut of app-store sales changed?

Will google stop showing google results at the top?

Will google be forced to actually not show ads on trademarked brands for their competitors?

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The purpose is to demonize big tech. It's the new "tough on crime." Of course there's a lot to criticize, but if criticizing and making change were the real goals, the hearing would look very different. They might have done more research and make specific demands.

edit/P.S.: I don't mean to sound sorry for big tech. They're not some poor unsuspecting victims. I'm just worried that they'll try to use this hearing, especially the vague "anti-conservative bias" questions, in order to trick people into supporting EARN IT.

> I don't understand why everyone gets so excited of this dog and pony show.

Because it is very entertaining.

Ahh !! ok.

I just wanted to make sure that it was purely for entertainment and I wasn't missing something about the bigger picture here. =]

This all I've been able to take from it.

The bizarro world going on between D's and R's alternating questions about antitrust and voting conspiracies is pretty funny and seeing CEOs who are surrounded by hand picked yes men getting squirmy at times trying to dodge combative questions, makes for entertaining episode of mid-day Maury Congress Edition but that's about it.

Much like trump

The real change is that voters that might not be as familiar with these issues see that the issues are enough to warrant this kind of discovery, and tune in.

Then, when people like Warren draft policy to, for example, introduce the concept of platform businesses so, for example, Amazon can't directly compete on the platform they own the data from, it won't fall on deaf ears.

Once you internalize the fact that this is an election year and that these congressional hearings are just meant to generate clips that will be replayed in your local senator's election ad ("Senator X ASKS the HARD questions!!"), it's much easier to watch them and be entertained.

Was thinking the same thing, not sure what actually gets done besides questions being asked. They even point out times these CEOs or higher up execs answered questions like these in the past that ended up not being truthful answers...but I guess there was nothing done then either.

I think the debate is whether or not these companies are monopolies that need to be trust busted.

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