Once, big technology companies were held in awe in Washington. How that has changed. Most noteworthy about this week’s showdown between bosses of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook and the House antitrust subcommittee was how the chiefs found themselves bashed by both sides of the political spectrum. Unlike the clumsy show of 2018, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress, lawmakers this time were well-prepared. Armed with 1.3m pages of documents unearthed in their 13-month probe of Big Tech, they landed some verbal blows. Since the investigation may shape future political efforts to curb the tech giants’ influence, the CEOs have reason to be nervous.

Any political consensus on toughening regulation may yet be hampered by a sharp bipartisan divide. Republicans’ central charge was that Silicon Valley has an inbuilt bias against conservatives. Such claims are easily disproved by a glimpse, say, at the most-clicked links on Facebook, which are regularly from conservative websites. Any idea of a pro-liberal bias is also belied perhaps by the vigour with which Democrats on the committee portrayed the tech chiefs as “cyber barons” whose companies distort competition in multiple ways.

Committee members’ accusations ranged from hooking in consumers by funnelling them towards their own products and services, to monetising consumers’ data while compromising their privacy, to using their power to stifle rivals — sometimes by taking them over. The corporate chiefs were sometimes unconvincing in claims that they did not remember particular events, or were “only joking” in apparently embarrassing emails.