WASHINGTON (AP) – Testimonial in Congress from the CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google (always local):
2:30 p.m.
The chairman of a Congressional committee investigating the strength of large-generation corporations has accused Google of exploiting its dominant search engine to borrow concepts and data from other Internet sites and manipulate their effects to bring others into their own virtual in order to build their profits.
Rep. David Cicilline gunned down Google CEO Sundar Pichai with allegations of abuse while questioning him Wednesday at a hearing that also placed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in virtual seats while answering questions from a video.
Pichai has continually hijacked Cicillin’s attacks by claiming that Google is seeking to provide maximum useful and applicable information to the millions of other people who use its search engine every day. He said it was part of his efforts to get them back rather than resorting to a rival service, such as Microsoft’s Bing.
Pichai went out of his way to answer a query about whether Google was threatening to sell Yelp from its search engine database after the Place to Eat review site told Google to avoid searching for content on its site. Yelp raised this factor a decade ago before Pichai became CEO in 2015.