From The New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is The Daily.

Today, the CEOs of the nation's most influential technology companies,

Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are brought before Congress to answer a question.

Are they the two powerful and two dominant monopolies of the internet age?

My colleague, Cecilia Kang, was in the room.

It's Thursday, July 30th.

Cecilia, we are talking just ahead of the start of what is probably the most anticipated hearing in the history of the tech industry.

So just to begin, why is this hearing happening at all?

This hearing is happening because there is a recognition across government that these four very powerful and very important companies to the economy have become so dominant

that they are harming consumers and harming competition.

So Congress has summoned the CEOs of the corporations.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Google to ask them and interrogate them on their business practices

and find out if these internet giants that have become, in many ways, the new trusts of our economy if they are harming consumers and competition.

So how exactly do we get to this point where these four executives are being summoned before Congress and being forced to confront that question?

I think you can start with the 2016 presidential election that really was a wake-up call in Washington and across the world really about the power of these social media platforms to be used for harm, not just for entertainment and good.

The presidential election of 2020 in the United States then really picked up on this feeling of concern.

I'm deeply concerned right now that this space around companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google is now referred to by venture capitalists as the Killzone.

And we saw for the first time a political candidate, Elizabeth Warren, announced her promise to break up Big Tech.

Break those things apart and we will have a much more competitive robust market in America. That's how capitalism should work.

This was the first time that even the real term Big Tech became sort of part of our lexicon?

Right, and almost like a kind of epithet.

Absolutely.

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