INSIDE BIG TECH: PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN WITH ‘HOT' EMAIL

The House Judiciary chairman was closing in on his Perry Mason moment with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Fortified with “hot” internal company documents, Rep. Jerrold Nadler was building his case at a hearing that seemed almost like a trial for Facebook and three other tech giants over alleged anti-competitive tactics.

“Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, you’re making my point,” Nadler declared. Then to the “jury:”

“By Mr. Zuckerberg’s own admission and by the documents we have from the time, Facebook saw Instagram as a threat that could potentially siphon business away from Facebook and so rather than compete with it, Facebook bought it.”

And then the closing argument: “This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition that the antitrust laws were designed to prevent. This should never have happened in the first place.”

The hearing empowered the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, led by Rep. David Cicilline, to publicly air information from more than one million internal documents provided by Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple during the panel’s yearlong investigation of Big Tech’s market dominance.

In doing so, lawmakers provided a rare glimpse inside the likely lines of inquiry being pursued by the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general as they conduct their own antitrust investigations into the tech companies. All are likely to have access to the same document trove.

Lawmakers played back words from the documents during last week’s hearing, which marked the first time that Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook testified (via video) as a group to Congress.