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For decades, the tech industry has shied away from scrutiny of mergers, acquisitions and potentially anticompetitive behavior as antitrust reformers argued their cases from the sidelines. But this week the industry’s biggest companies will be forced to face the evidence head-on.

Tomorrow, lawmakers will face the CEOs of four of the biggest names in the tech industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Since last June, members of the House of Representatives have been conducting a sweeping investigation of the tech industry, focusing on whether some of its most famous names have become “too powerful.” For the past year, the antitrust subdivision of the House Judiciary Committee has led the investigation, and until tomorrow, the tech CEOs will face their final trial.

Apple, Facebook and Google have not commented on the antitrust investigation, while Amazon declined to comment.

The CEOs of four major tech companies appeared at the hearing

At the hearing, evidence from the investigation could end up on the public record. Over the course of its year-long investigation, the committee obtained at least 1.3 million documents from testifying firms, held five public hearings and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google have already faced questions from Congress.

Led by Chairman David Sicily, committee members will go into hearings this week with piles of receipts, leaving little room for executives to avoid uncomfortable questions.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PRAMILA JAYAPAL SAYING: “The other hearings that they testified about were not really oversight hearings, they were not about antitrust and monopolistic practices, that’s not what we do. We are investigators.”

The main purpose of tomorrow’s hearing is to allow Mr Zuckerberg, Mr Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook to comment on the formidable record of evidence the committee has assembled over the past 13 months since Microsoft was accused of antitrust wrongdoing in the 1990s. No tech CEO would even consider these documents.

At the end of that investigation, the commission plans to issue a report in the next few months detailing how executives’ respective companies evade their responsibilities under current antitrust laws because the competition rules never take into account the behavior of the tech industry.

David Sicily last week said in a statement, “since last June, the group committee have been investigating a few digital platform of dominant position, and the adequacy of existing anti-monopoly law and law enforcement, in view of these companies in the United States the core role in the life of the people, their chief executives can actively cooperate with is very important. As we have said from the very beginning, their testimony is essential to the completion of this investigation.”

Antitrust investigations are common among big companies

The hearing was particularly difficult for Jeff Bezos, who was testifying before Congress for the first time. Amazon has been a prime target of tech antitrust scholars for years, and the recent evidence puts it in a particularly precarious position. At a hearing last July, Nate Sutton, Amazon’s deputy general counsel, said the company does not obtain sales data from sellers.

But in April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees were using independent seller data to guide the development of Amazon’s own products. According to the Wall Street Journal, employees allegedly analyzed sales and profit margins for products such as car trunk tissue racks sold by third-party vendors before launching their own competing products. After the report was published, the House Judiciary Committee called Bezos to testify on the matter. Most likely, Bezos will be asked about the Wall Street Journal article and forced to explain what the company is doing.

Almost every company that emerges has a similar sore spot. Apple is facing antitrust investigations in both the US and the EU over its App Store policies, in particular the fact that it has cut the fees it charges through the App Store by an average of 30%.

Last month, David said in an interview on the media of Sicily, apple fee equivalent to “highway robbery” Google may be asked to solve its reign as the dominant as a search engine, and lawmakers may investigate zuckerberg in trouble in the history of Facebook, including sets, these acquisitions basically avoid the regulatory scrutiny.

As Democrats push the antitrust case, Republicans have their own set of concerns, and they may try to shift the hearing toward moderate and conservative charges of bias.

Representative Matt Gates shone in the subcommittee and moderate Republican fight against a bigoted platform. Matt Gates has filed a criminal complaint against Zuckerberg, accusing him of making false statements to Congress during past hearings.

Companies could also try to talk at the hearing about Chinese apps like TikTok and how new competition rules will make American products less competitive with Chinese ones.

But Democrats are likely to try to avoid that avoidance, focusing on how these companies stifle competition by copying and buying up rivals in order to destroy them. With so many big companies in trouble at the same time, progressive lawmakers see this as an opportunity to show that anti-competitive behavior is a pattern across the industry, and not just the result of individual bad behavior.

The hearing is not the end, and the antitrust investigation will continue

While tomorrow’s hearing will temporarily end the Judiciary Committee’s investigation of Big Tech, it is only the beginning of future regulatory or legislative action. What the executives said at the hearing could provide evidence for new antitrust investigations by law enforcement and could provide the basis for legislation in Congress aimed at regulating the industry.

For experts like Dipayan Ghosh, for experts on the antitrust panel, the hearings simply marked the end of the evidence-gathering effort.

Dipayan Ghosh, a former Facebook employee, is a Pozen Fellow who studies the tech industry at the John F. Kennedy School of Government Association.

“This is the beginning, it can’t be the end, because if this is the end, I don’t expect anything to happen in the future,” he said.

It’s a huge pressure on lawmakers, but if executed well, the hearings could usher in a new era of antitrust regulation in the tech industry. After months of interviews and requests for documents, lawmakers and regulators finally had a chance to get straight answers from all the big companies at once.

Getting all four CEOs on the same panel at the same time takes a lot of work, and Congress is unlikely to have that chance again anytime soon. Now, their responsibility is to make it count.