Facebook Libra team appeared before the Senate Committee at the Capitol Hill Anti-Trust hearing.
David Marcus, the head of Calibra at the Facebook’s Libra stablecoin project, appeared before the committee to defend Facebook Libra.
Opening the hearing Senator Sherrod Brown shredding Facebook’s accountability and intentions expressed that “Facebook is dangerous,” he continued to describe a list of things Facebook has had a bad impact on and expressed
“Zukerberg and his executive just don’t understand that governing or accountability, they are not running a government they are running a for-profit laboratory. No Facebook executives have been to my knowledge have been harmed by Facebook’s experiments but look [at] what has happened to everyone where Facebook has run its social experiments on us.”
Brown continued to bash Facebook with the comments that:
“Their motto has been move fast and break things, they certainly have; they moved fast and broke our political discourse, they moved fast and broke journalism, they moved fast and help orchestrate a genocide, they moved fast and are helping to undermine our democracy.”
Summing up his concerns and the idea behind allowing Facebook to initiate Libra, he said that:
“Now Facebook asks people to trust them with their hard earned pay-cheuqes. Takes a break taking amount of arrogance, breath taking amount of arrogance with that track record and think, -mockingly- You know what we really oughta do next, let’s run our own bank and our own for profit version of the Federal Reserves and lets do it for the whole world.”
During the hearing, most Senators were critical of the Facebook Libra and the very intentions behind the idea of this stablecoin.
Where Senator from Virginia Mark Werner explicitly asked Marcus whether or not Facebook and Whats App will allow access to other wallets within Facebook and Whats App beside Calibra.
Head of Calibra, however, denied that Facebook or Whats App would allow embedding another wallet within the application but consumers would be able to use other wallets to send and receive money to people using Calibra through Facebook and Libra.
The Chairman of the committee announced that Senators could submit any further questions by the 23rd of July 2019, and directed the head of Calibra Marcus to answer them to the best he can.
The committee hearing was adjourned on the note that the U.S government would not allow high-tech giants to make use of the loopholes in the existing regulations or allow anyone to sideline the regulators. A clear signal towards tough regulations.
