Where in the World Is Larry Page?

I agree that business leaders have to answer for their actions. But that is clearly not what is happening at these inquiries. The CEO of Equifax was called to one when they had their major security breach last year. What came of that? Can we all honestly say, a year later, that he answered for his company's actions? Nothing of consequence happened to him, very little if anything of consequence happened to his company, and as far as I know only minor changes happened to their industry.

My point in my original post is that these inquiries should have WAY harsher consequences than they have. Larry Page should be facing the real possibility of jail time right now for not having shown up. Policy changes should be coming from these inquiries.

But, sadly, none of that is going to happen and we all know it. Because you don't put a guy who helps fund your campaign in jail.

> They offered their legal guy who is also one of the main leaders at Google and is probably the right person to talk about this but Congress refused. They want figureheads.

Why is this a problem? The CEO is the public face of the company. If Congress wants to question the company about serious issues, it shouldn't settle for a little-known subordinate who has much less authority or accountability for the decisions Congress wants to ask about.

The sales pitches to partners were quite different, from what I can see.

Google have always been selling advertising first and foremost. Their pitch is "we will put you in front of the right people".

Facebook, an other social network providers, seem to have modernised this badly. The social graph and access to it was the key offering, so their pitch was "we will give you access to the right people".

How did it go on like that for so long? There were four sets of entities involved who for their own reasons did nothing:

1. Those buying the access knew the difference and eagerly lapped up as much as they could.

2. The general public was blissfully unaware until the recent furore so there was no push to change anything from that side. To quite an extent, IMO, many were not just unaware but deliberately ignorant - many of us, techies like myself and active members of privacy groups, were aware and talking loudly about the issues but the majority didn't care because they didn't see how it might significantly affect them personally.

3. Commercial entities, even direct competitors, said nothing because they thought it better to try take a piece of the pie for themselves instead of sprinkling laxatives over someone else's and risk the pie shop being closed down. They are of course right now either being investigated too, or hurriedly making sure they were not (or that it can not be proven that they were) directly and knowingly culpable of the same things.

4. While there was no public or commercial push against what facebook and others were doing, the politicians had no interest. No point siring up potential commercial sponsors for their future funding drives unnecessarily...

> This just goes to show how much of a charade these hearings are.

Literally no one in the public is going to pay attention or give a shit about hearings where Congress questions lower level executives with little to no decision-making authority.

It's not a charade to want to question the one guy in the company who unquestionably has authority over whatever decisions Congress wants to ask about. If you think they should settle for talking to a new exec with no authority, why not expect them to settle for talking to an intern reading prepared statements?

> Alphabet said in a statement that it had offered its head of global affairs for the hearing and that “enabling Larry to focus on the other bets and long-term technical problems is exactly what Alphabet was set up for.”

So basically they had offered someone of authority here, but the politicians wanted to have their show trial with the celebrities instead.