Party agendas, yet again, prevent us from getting real answers from a tech titan

For the third time in as many months, the House Judiciary Committee called in a tech giant. Starting with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, Congress continued to bring in the top dogs to testify on national TV about their products and platforms, and this time, they landed a huge testimony. CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was called in to answer any and all questions for over three hours, and there was so many questions to ask. Between Google's idea to relaunch in China to the Google+ data breach (one and two) to the Russian election interference, the Committee had enough ammunition to make any CEO sweat...

And yet again, Congress couldn't get over themselves.

An opportunity like this may never happen again. The House Committee had a prime opportunity to dig deep in to what is happening at Google, the world's search czar. Google+ had just had its second data breach leading to the consumer closure deadline moving up four months, and yet, no one cared about consumer data security. Rumors about Dragonfly, Google's Chinese search product facing heavy scrutiny due to Chinese censorship, and yet, only a few touched the subject and stayed awfully close to the surface at that. Finally, like with Facebook, Google faces tremendous scrutiny due to algorithms that helped Fake News find a spot near the top of search results leading to the "Trusted Flaggers" program, but that was not even a concern of this committee. Hell, I would have even settled for a question or two about the European bundling situation and how it could be utilized in the United States...but barely a passing comment about that.

Instead, what we got, much like the Zuckerberg hearing, was an inside squabble that resulted in Pichai being the child stuck between two bickering hearings. On the right, the hearing became just another opportunity to please constituents by endlessly arguing about political bias against conservatives; at one point, Mr. Pichai was even notified that he was surrounded by leftists that "hated those who love their country and constitution" a.k.a. conservatives (thanks for that little comment Mr. Gohmert). Of course, this sort of grandstanding was quickly established by Mr. Poe who was determined to find out if Google could track whether he changed seats; he was less concerned with Sundar's actual reply ("It would depend on your settings") and more concerned with what he was hoping Sundar would say, "Of course it does," because that sounds better to rile up his base. Despite all that, the icing on the Republican-ridiculousness-cake came from Mr. Steve King who demanded Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) to tell him why his granddaughter was getting "ugly" notifications about her grandfather on a used iPhone.

However, Democrats provided just as useless questions as their Republican counterparts (although on a different topic). Rather than simply ignore the Republican theatre and focus on questions of actual importance, Democrats on the committee chose to use their time defending Pichai against conservatives and lobbying softball questions for the CEO. Mr. Lieu took his time to dismiss bias allegations while simultaneously praising Mr. Steve Scalise and slamming Mr. King ("If you want good search results, do good things."). Ms. Zofgren used her time to both showcase that searching "idiot" displays pictures of President Trump and allow Mr. Pichai to explain why that could be. Also mixed in to the three and half hour hearing was various explanations and comments regarding why bias in the system is nearly impossible.

While it may have made for good theatre and allowed Republicans and Democrats to spar on national television (twice in one day), the hearing neglected to actually solve any problems or make any information more clear. Pichai maintained a position of non-committal on China, side-stepped any grilling on data-breaches, and was barely asked about his thoughts on tech regulation. Instead of concrete answers, the world was given a side-show act dominated by an issue that does not exist nor would be highly important if it did. The only true, definitive point that could be taken out of yesterday's farce was that this guy pulls off one amazing interpretation of Rich Uncle Pennybags: