| Hey, it's Josh. About two hours into yesterday's congressional hearings on antitrust issues in the tech industry, the conversation seemed to be devolving into an embarrassing partisan spectacle. Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had just endured a line of combative questioning over whether his company was planning to throw this fall's election in favor of the Democrats—he said it wasn't—when Representative Mary Gay Scanlon took the microphone. "I'd like to redirect your attention to antitrust law from fringe conspiracy theories," said Scanlon, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. She then began quizzing Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos about the company's 2010 acquisition of Quidsi, the company that owned Diapers.com. Citing documents obtained by congressional investigators, Scanlon said that Amazon had decided it could lose $200 million a month by selling diapers below cost, to pressure Quidsi to sell itself rather than compete. She said Amazon then jacked up prices after it acquired the company. The Diapers.com story wasn't entirely new; it showed up in a book my boss once wrote about Amazon. But the details were novel, as was the chance to watch Bezos's halting attempts to explain his company's behavior in public. Bezos said retailers often lure new parents in with low-cost diapers, but that he couldn't remember the specifics. There was always a tension about the purpose of these hearings. Whenever they're given the chance to grill four of the world's most powerful business leaders in public, lawmakers are inevitably going to pursue their pet causes. There was a good deal of that, mostly in the form of rehashed accusations from Republicans of Silicon Valley's anti-conservative bias and insufficient patriotism. But the legislators, often armed with internal documents, also pinned down the executives on how they wield market power. It has yet to be determined whether the investigation leads to updated antitrust laws that are more appropriate for today's digital market. But the hearings did illustrate that, at the least, dominant tech companies have been involved in business practices that are very uncomfortable to talk about on live television. The common complaint from past hearings—that members of Congress don't know enough about tech to ask useful questions—didn't apply. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified over video chat in front of a blank white wall, ended up in a particularly awkward exchange with Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington. Jayapal asked if Facebook copied the products of competitors like Instagram and Snap Inc. to pressure them into accepting acquisition offers. Zuckerberg responded that he didn't know if Facebook's lookalike products truly threatened those smaller companies. Jayapal then cited a document in which Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom worried that Facebook would go into "destroy mode" if he didn't sell the startup. The emails obtained by the lawmakers could be a big deal. Besides the Amazon Diapers.com discussions, the documents suggest Facebook looked at acquisitions as a way to neutralize competitors. On the same day the company announced its Instagram acquisition, Zuckerberg described the app as a "threat," and added "one thing about startups is that you can so often acquire them." Advocates of stronger antitrust enforcement often hold up Facebook's Instagram deal as a key example of abusive market behavior. The new documents are fodder for their case. In past hearings, lawmakers have come off as gaffe-prone and even alarmingly unserious about the industry's most urgent issues. This time, they laid out a coherent case that tech's largest companies have immense power over most competitors, and that they're using that power to become further entrenched. It remains to be seen if lawmakers have any viable solutions, or whether anything that looks like one can advance through a notoriously dysfunctional legislative process. But it will be hard for the industry to write this hearing off as just another sideshow. —Joshua Brustein | 
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