Ben Thompson’s Questions for Tech Company CEOs ⇥ stratechery.com

Another good piece written before Wednesday’s antitrust hearing, from Ben Thompson:

To that end, I thought it would be interesting to think about what questions I would ask each of the CEOs were I on the committee — and to be clear, not all of these questions are being antagonistic (to take one example, I actually believe that Apple is justified in not allowing side-loading); I do think they deserve greater scrutiny though. […]

The fact that Apple and Google have more questions than Amazon and Facebook is not an accident: as I detailed in that article they have much more significant antitrust issues. It will be interesting to see if that fact is recognized by the committee. I am also interested to what extent these CEOs address each other; if any one CEO does make statements about another company, I would bet on Tim Cook attempting to raise questions about privacy and data collection, and thus focus more attention on Google and Facebook. Remember, though, this is the antitrust subcommittee — I hope committee members stay focused on competition issues.

I love Thompson’s optimism here, but this panned out almost exactly opposite of how he was hoping. Apple faced the least number of questions; Facebook and Google were each questioned more than twice as often. And, no, it did not stay focused on competition.