Who gets technology? Not lawmakers, old and young…
Gotta admit, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimonies on Capitol Hill were painful to watch!
So much shade around this week’s testimonies on Capitol Hill by Facebook’s founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From the extra padding on the chair and the viral photo of his notes, to a Washington Post op-ed by Dana Milbank titled “Boy billionaire Mark Zuckerberg struggles to play the grown-up.”
Boy? Really?
That’s fluff, pure shade… And technology, I believe, is not about age.
What seems to have struck people watching the three-day marathon the most was not the fluff, but how little substance was discussed. Some say a generational wall impeded any constructive dialogue between lawmakers and Zuckerberg, and vice-versa. But to me is more about the willingness to understand each other, and that was missing. In addition, Zuckerberg had certainly been intensely prepped, but not senators and congresspeople.
This shifted the attention from substance to fluff and small talk about the role of the Internet today and the future of technology and privacy. It is not just about large corporate giant like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. It’s also about young startups and understanding how to create a safe, creative, and open environment for both platforms and users.
Of course a bit was discussed, although not in details.
It seems a great deal of attention was on Europe and its General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, about to enter into force in the European Union at the end of May and to have a significant effect on how Internet businesses operate in Europe, no matter if they are located or not within one the the EU’s member states.
What was discussed then?
After watching more then 10 hours of testimony, it looks like many questions were about “technical support” — to put it in Dennis Crowley words — more than technology policy.
Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, posted on Twitter: “some of this Zuck testimony sounds a lot like me providing technical support to my relatives over Thanksgiving.”
“The senators were a joke!,” said quite blatantly Kara Swisher of Recode at the end of the first day of testimony.
She compared their questions to Zuckerberg as him getting “hit by soft, soft, soft, very nice cashmere pillows,” and she often referred to the testimonies as “help desk” talk.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearing is painful to watch,” wrote Elizabeth Linder, senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, and former public spokeswoman of Facebook in London. “Not because Mark himself is more comfortable in his natural habitat on Hacker Square than in the US capital. But because most of the senators’ questions revealed all-too publicly how little they frame their lives according to the barometer of a digital age.”
She added: “With the world’s eyes on US Congress, imagine the respect American senators would have drawn from the people they represent and from far-flung corners of the globe by actively listening, absorbing and digesting the information delivered during a robust back-and-forth between their digitally-savvy staff and the CEO of the world’s largest social media platform. As a 21 year-old WhatsApped me while we were watching the hearing, ‘These questions are the wrong questions’.”
A USA TODAY reader wrote: “That had to be tough. Answering questions at the first-grade level and not laughing. These senators really should have just sat down with some of their older children and had them explain how a Web browser and the Internet in general work. They came to the table totally unequipped to ask meaningful questions.”
Andrew Golis at Vox joked on Twitter: “This Congressional hearing is making a strong case that we need more Senators under the age of 75.” He added: “I threw up 75 as a joke, but actually at least 5 of the Senators asking questions of Zuckerberg so far are 75 or older. Grassley, 84. Nelson, 75. Feinstein, 84. Orin Hatch, 84. Patrick Leahy, 78. Striking.”
And the same feeling seems quite widespread. A Fast Company article by Mark Sullivan was titled: “Zuckerberg Just Proved Once Again That Congress Doesn’t Understand The Internet.” The subtitle: “Today’s jumbled Facebook hearing left little faith that Congress could ever draft a useful data-protection bill, much less agree on one.”
Sullivan pointed put that Zuckerberg, in his opening remarks, said: “You will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer.”
But here’s one of the most viral questions on the first day of testimony:
Senator Orrin Hatch: “If [a version of Facebook will always be free], how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”
Mark Zuckerberg: “Senator, we run ads.”
Senator Hatch pursued a line of questioning on whether Facebook will always be free, “which in fairness to the senator — as MarketWatch reported — got Zuckerberg on the record as saying there will always be ‘a version’ of Facebook that’s free leaving open the possibility of a paid version.”
The line of questioning wasn’t just about Facebook and its business model, but also about some of Facebook’s apps, including WhatsApp.
“Here’s another example of how senators don’t necessarily know how Facebook and its products work,” wrote Recode in its live reporting from Capitol Hill. “Sen. Brian Schatz asked multiple times if his WhatsApp messages could be used to inform the ads he sees. Zuckerberg replied multiple times that WhatsApp messages are fully encrypted — which means no, Facebook cannot read them. Schatz is certainly not the only one with that question, but the exchange shows how Facebook has to routinely help people understand how its services work on a pretty basic level.”
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