[jjoonathan]

This is a game for two. Politicians try to score soundbites. Businessmen try to obscure misdeeds.

Amazon admitted to using aggregated seller data for competitive purposes. That's not illegal, but it should be, and congress should fix the gaps in the laws. Since Bezos doesn't want this, he dragged the conversation into the weeds (the aggregated/non-aggregated distinction and the proving-a-negative discussion).

That's fine. Everyone acted in their self-interest, as expected. What confuses me is how ridiculously effective the diversions were. This thread is full of people chasing the chaff. People who ought to know better.

[BurningFrog]

> This is a game for two

It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

[iaw]

I see an advantage to the businessmen as the net outcome. It's still business as usual and they continue reaping handsome profits for questionable practices while addressing the accusations from their 'critics'.

[salawat]

>It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

>Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

Your response is odd. The fact perjury is a possible outcome if a knowingly misleading answer is given doesn't change the equation of the fundamental social interaction.

Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

The capacity to give a concise number, or the propensity to avoid answering the question speaks volumes more to the necessity of regulation than any candid response would.

[thaumasiotes]

> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites.

I mean, if you watch the questioning, it's very clear that they are.

Look at e.g. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' questioning of Mark Zuckerberg.

[salawat]

I've watched previous testimonies of Zuckerberg, the Libra one was infuriating as someone who has worked in the financial industry. Suffice it to say if he spent half as much time giving candid answers instead of evading the question or burning the clock to get to the next Congressperson's question, I might have some more sympathy.

As I recall AOC had particular difficulty getting a straight answer out of him back then too, as did several other Congresspeople, including a few who were far more reasonable, accommodating, and less incentivized to go down the route of theatrics than AOC, and asked fairly standard, straightforward questions. Those questions were met with answers which were evasive and vacuous on average; downright equivocations and deceptions at worst.

[michaelt]

Are you sure that impression doesn't come from the fact things that aren't soundbites don't end up in front of you?

As I only spend 1 minute a day on political news, there's a lot of scope for politicians to do non-soundbite things and me not to hear about it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Are you sure that impression doesn't come from the fact things that aren't soundbites don't end up in front of you?

Yes. This has been discussed before. (See e.g. the 3 comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16807245 )

In particular:

> By the time you hear a pointed question in the committee hearing room or a speech in a floor "debate" from a Senator, they've been over it with staff, decided on a position, and calculated the optimal move to present to the cameras. That you enjoy or agree with the thrust of this particular show has no bearing on the theatricality of committee hearings as a tactic. They wouldn't do it if no one enjoyed it.

> It's not that politicians don't debate things in good faith. It's that they do it with and through staff (who are more like the people you find in high school debate than televised election debate), behind closed doors, and not on the floor.

The official questioning time is entirely staged. If a Congressman wants to know something, there are many ways for them to learn, but none of those ways involve televised oral questioning under tight time limits. That just isn't the purpose the formal questioning serves.

[ghthor]

Just because some of the elected officials act like children, doesnt mean they all do.

[roenxi]

> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

I don't completely disagree; political subcommittees do tend to be more practical than politics at large. But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something. The committee process is a legitimate one for that sort of thing, but there are much easier ways to to figure out what is going on. If they actually care about matters of fact politicians tend ask domain experts to write a report - that is a much more comprehensive and nuanced approach.

Literally everything in a committee is about building a narrative to underpin political action. And the people appearing in front of the committee will generally not be the people who were advocating for that action.

[salawat]

>But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something.

Generally speaking, committee's don't happen if there is no reason to believe that any of the alternate means you brought up as examples would be sufficient to resolve the problem. In fact, many of those may have already been addressed or attempted to unsatisfactory result. The legislature has organized and tasked the committee with this investigation as an expression of the "Will of the People" to get to the bottom of business of redressing the grievances of the Constituency, and building policy on the basis of the facts collected. In Facebook's case, largely prompted by not adhering to a previously unnecessary to enumerate social norm, which many people have begun to become concerned with Facebook's primary business model being reliant, and the consequent leveraging of advantaged position via network effect exploitation to prevent competition.

As a corporate citizen of the United States, there is no adversity here. You're in this country, granted legitimacy by the authority of our institutions. If the political apparatus taps you on the shoulder and deems it necessary to look into the facts of what you're doing, nothing at all should change about what you're doing or the answers you give. That behavior of manipulating the response you give in response to interrogation by Congress is analogous to anti-debugger code; obfuscation being an act of perjury. This is fact finding and policy building by duly elected representatives. There should be no adversity. No legitimacy or illusion of legitimate competition acknowledged.

This is humanscale debugging by an authority mechanism implemented by a distributed decision making and consensus engine in the form of a Congress of elected representatives. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't accept the right of a Corporation or an Executive to evade or deceive official legislative apparata. The called already has going in their favor that a great deal of the population are highly resistant to meaningless change, and that there needs to be a non-trivial consensus for change.

Now I fully acknowledge we may have gotten away from the ideal of how things should work, and that when you're dealing with human beings, the level of nuance and communications overloading associated with a state bearing comment skyrockets; but that still does not to me justify lying by omission or outright to your legislature or it's representatives, or intentionally wasting their time for your gain or to intentionally frustrate policy making. If you can't be honest to the collective proxy of $the_rest_of_the_nation, you've got your priorities all sorts of misaligned, and if you're feeling that threatened by the experience, maybe, just maybe, it's finally coming back in unequivocal terms that something needs to fundamentally change about your operational model. I also acknowledge that making the determination of what is "frustrating policy making" and what is just best effort is left fuzzy, and in that fuzziness creates a dangerous policy tool to be abused. I make no claims or suggestion to what should or shouldn't be done in the event thereof, or what the determination that obstruction of policy making has occurred looks like. I'm only pointing out that if you accept as legitimate "defensive legislative perception management" you've undermined the status of the legislature from "wielders of the power of the collective social apparatus, and the authority and access to privileged information that comes with it" to "For sale: invest in a full time employee to haunt enough representatives, and you too can have a law."

There is no illegitimacy in any question being asked. Axiomatically, this is basically people with as close to societal root access as you can get trying to build a realistic representation of the socio-governmental system in order to plot a reasonable course to satisfy $rest_of_the_country.

TL;DR: So long as everything is being done by the book; there should be no self-preservation or overt attempts at manipulation being acceptable. Only as accurate of a rendering of facts as possible, and where a subjective question is asked, a candid answer provided.

For it to be any other way reeks to me of dysfunction, and an overt admission of a lack of integrity, and standing in opposition to the very thing that grants you the legitimacy and capability to live in the manner you desire.

From a social and civic point of view, it isn't and shouldn't be a contest. Just a mechanism at work.

[roenxi]

> That behavior of manipulating the response you give in response to interrogation by Congress is analogous to anti-debugger code; obfuscation being an act of perjury.

The parallel between debugging and political committee hearings is pretty weak. Code tends to be repeatable and fairly easy to build consensus on (eg, a group of developers will have a fairly clear and reasonable band of opinions on whether networking code is succeeding or failing). In politics, even basic questions like what the question is are subject to uncertainty and there is no consensus on even basic points.

> I don't accept the right of a Corporation or an Executive to evade or deceive official legislative apparata

So if the official legislative apparata asked you to "explain, in detail, how your activity has broken the law?" how would you answer that if you don't believe you've broken the law? That sort of question is a little uncommon but entirely plausible in a committee hearing. It is impossible to answer directly; the person in the hot seat has to push back on the premise and answer a different question.

What you are saying there is implicitly supporting the idea that the people in front of the committee should agree with the agenda of the committee. That isn't reasonable.