CAN CONGRESS REIN IN BIG TECH?
Washington has been happy to let high-tech companies police themselves—until now
ABOUT TWO HOURS INTO A SENATE HEARING ON April 10, Mark Zuckerberg was asked if he would like to take a break. He was in the midst of a rare spectacle: two powerful committees, with a total of 44 Senators, were holding a joint hearing to grill a single CEO. So when Zuckerberg responded by saying he wasn’t tired yet, the packed room broke into laughter. The levity didn’t last long. “What happened here was, in effect, willful blindness,” said Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the next at bat, as he pressed the 33-year-old Facebook founder on exactly how a political marketing firm called Cambridge Analytica ended up with data from some 87 million users’ profiles without their consent. “It was heedless,” he went on,
