Slightly unexpected...

After Tuesday's underwhelming performance by U.S. Senators, I wasn't expecting Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the House to go much differently. It turns out that I might have been a bit too pessimistic about that.

From the NY Times:

While Tuesday’s Senate hearing contained tough questions, the lawmakers were generally deferential to the executive. That was less the case in the House, where lawmakers repeatedly interrupted Mr. Zuckerberg and chided him for not answering questions to their satisfaction.

Lawmakers on both side of the aisle on Wednesday pushed Mr. Zuckerberg on his company’s handling of user data. They were particularly focused on the platform’s privacy settings, which put the onus on users to protect their privacy.

[...]

Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon and chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, kicked off the hearing by declaring that “while Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured.”

Mr. Walden floated the prospect of regulation, saying that “I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”

Later in the hearing, Mr. Zuckerberg said regulation was “inevitable.” But he repeated that the right kind of regulation mattered and he pointed out that some regulation could only solidify the power of a large company like Facebook, which could hurt start-ups.

Facebook's CEO not only recognizing that new regulation is "inevitable," but asserting that new regulations should not be unfairly advantageous for FB? Unexpected.

Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg made a promise. He said that Facebook planned to give users worldwide the same privacy controls required by a tough new data protection law which will go into effect in the European Union next month.

This morning, Representatives Gene Green, a Texas Democrat, and Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, pressed him repeatedly on the issue. And Mr. Zuckerberg repeated his commitment to give all users those controls.

But European regulators and privacy advocates said over the last week that a number of Facebook’s current practices seemed violate the new law, called the General Data Protection Regulation.

For one thing, the European law requires privacy by design and default. European experts said that, in their view, that would require Facebook turn off a number of advertising and privacy settings which are currently set to sharing and instead ask user permission to turn them on.

Mr. Zuckerberg answered the legislators’ questions by saying that the company plans to put a tool “at the top of everyone’s app” where users will be able to make privacy and sharing choices. But the company may not offer affirmative consent — asking users to explicitly opt-in — in every country, depending on legal issues, he said.

Clarity about how he could implement GDPR across Facebook, while still implementing it differently in different countries? Also unexpected. I liked that the NYT noticed that FB isn't complying with the GDPR yet, even in the EU, and explained that requiring users to opt-in to the protections doesn't meet the GDPR standard. At least one U.S. Congressman noticed, too:

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, pressed Mr. Zuckerberg on whether Facebook would agree or refuse to change Facebook’s default settings to minimize collection and use of users’ data.

“This is a complex issue that deserves more than a one word answer,” Mr. Zuckerberg answered.

“That’s disappointing to me,” Mr. Pallone responded.

The concern was echoed by Representative Bobby L. Rush, a Democrat of Illinois, who pointed a finger at Mr. Zuckerberg and asked: “Why is the onus on the user to opt in to privacy and security settings?”

But Mr. Zuckerberg also did not dismiss a proposal from Representative Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California, to create a digital consumer protection agency that would subject Facebook and its peers to some degree of government involvement.

Mr. Zuckerberg called the idea one “that deserves a lot of consideration” but said that the “details on this really matter.”

Elected officials actually prepping properly to question the Facebook CEO, and having actually intelligent, thoughtful questions to ask that weren't just prompts for Zuckerberg's well-honed talking points? I was expecting this from the Senate, not the House, but it's the House which actually delivered... unexpected.

Suddenly, it looks like at least one of the two days of Zuckerberg testimony before Congress wasn't a complete waste of time, and it's starting to sound like House Democrats, at least, are sufficiently up to speed on the details of this issue to craft some effective legislation... assuming they get a chance to do so. And with Facebook now co-operating with Special Counsel Muller's investigation, the issue of FB's fecklessness isn't going to have a chance to go away in the interim, which means that there might still be enough heat on this issue in January for that legislation to actually happen.

In the meantime, it looks like the brief relief of FB's Wall Street investors may not last, either. At least, CNBC's Jim Cramer doesn't think so:

"We simply can't like Facebook as much as we used to," Cramer said, adding that his charitable trust has been selling shares of Facebook. "You don't like a company more after its CEO gets grilled by lawmakers, you like it less."

Congress' inclination to regulate Facebook could also reflect poorly on the stock, particularly when much of Congress seemed to have a weak grasp on the core aspects of the business, Cramer said.

The "Mad Money" host added that he didn't get what he wanted from Facebook: an independent investigator who could review Facebook's practices and try to prevent another situation like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"If there is another situation like this, Congress is going to take a pretty dim view of Zuckerberg's testimony," Cramer said. "He needs to get out ahead of the next scandal."

If there's one thing that we know Zuckerberg and Facebook are terrible at, it's getting out in ahead of the next scandal.

Mark Zuckerberg would seem to have both succeeded and failed at his testimonial strategy. He succeeded, in that the testimony itself seems to have gone as well as he could have expected. But he may also have failed, since it doesn't look like this performance went well enough to prevent the sort of new regulations that he seemed keen to avoid. Yay... victory?

At this point, I have absolutely no idea what we should expect next from this story, but you can bet that I'll be keeping a close eye on it. And so should you.

BTW, the NY Times piece that I'm quoting contains a lot more detailed coverage than I've quoted here, so click through and give them some love.