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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: How big is too big? That's the question at the heart of a hearing on Capitol Hill today. AILSA CHANG, HOST: Four of America's top tech executives appeared before

the House Judiciary Committee - Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai. They were asked whether their companies are

monopolies that harm consumers. SHAPIRO: Here's Democratic Congressman David Cicilline. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DAVID CICILLINE: The evidence seems very clear to me. As

Google became the gateway to the Internet, it began to abuse its power. It used its surveillance over Web traffic to identify competitive threats and crush them. CHANG: The hearing was

seasoned with pandemic flavor. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CICILLINE: Excuse me. I'm going to remind members of this committee, unless you are speaking, our rules require you to

wear a mask, according to the attending physician. No, I'm speaking about another member of this committee. SHAPIRO: And GOP Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner wanted the tech CEOs to answer

for this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JIM SENSENBRENNER: As we know, companies like Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter have become the public square today where political

debate unfolds in real time, but reports that dissenting views, often conservative views, are targeted or censored is seriously troubling. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. _NPR

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authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record._