Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s three and a half hour testimony before the House Judiciary Committee today — and the problem with congressional tech executive hearings — is perhaps best encapsulated by his brief exchange with Texas Rep. Ted Poe.

“I have an iPhone," Poe said, brandishing the device for all to see. "If I go and sit with my Democratic friends over there, does Google track my movement?"

Pichai began to reply, explaining that the answer to Poe's question really depends on a bunch of smartphone minutiae — location services, app settings, privacy configurations, etc. But before he could finish, Poe cut him off. “It’s a 'yes' or 'no' question,” he bellowed. (It wasn’t.)

The exchange is an exemplar of the disconnect, the frustrations, and the pointlessness of the past year's parade of tech executive hearings. Congress calls for Silicon Valley to have its day in the DC hot seat; then the day comes, and instead we find it's a booster seat. Or an opportunity for congressional yelling. Or executive evasiveness. And in any case, nothing much is accomplished.

Take Poe’s question. Its topic — data privacy and location tracking — is important, but the wording was unartful, and it revealed, immediately, a poor understanding of the workings of the technology to which it referred. Conversely, Pichai’s answer seemed to purposefully ignore the spirit of the question, focusing on semantics instead of a reasonable answer. (For example: “While I don’t know the particulars of your device, yes, many Google apps track granular location information.”) The end result? Nothing worthwhile.

Instead the roughly 210 minutes of hearing testimony were mostly devoted to shallow questions from lawmakers about political bias. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan devoted five minutes to asking about an email from a marketing executive at Google, grilling Pichai about individual employee efforts to help mobilize Latino voters. Rep. Lamar Smith spent his time spent his time citing studies with dubious methodology (the report’s author previously noted her methods were "not scientific") alleging a deep political bias in Google’s news results. Rep. Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican, complained anecdotally about search results, claiming he only saw negative stories about his party’s Affordable Care Act repeal bills, suggesting a nefarious anti-conservative bias. Meanwhile, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, used part of his five minutes to bemoan the Google search results for his own name — suggesting the search engine has a pro-conservative bias. In one instance, Iowa Rep. Steve King asked if Pichai would release the names of Google’s search engineers so they could be independently investigated for their own political beliefs.

This focus on superficial issues of employee bias created a missed opportunity to really probe Google’s business practices. Especially when you consider the company globally — in search, mapping, web browsing, and even mobile — everyone else is an also-ran. It notoriously crushes competition and bleeds its rivals by favoring its own products in its results — all of which comes together to make it by far the most dominant player in advertising. It also means that its screwups happen at an unprecedented scale.

Which is why it is a shame that there was so little time devoted to how it is often used to sow division and radicalize users. It took more than two hours before Pichai was asked about YouTube’s vast repository of slanderous conspiratorial videos. His lackluster reply — “We always think that there is more to do” — went unchallenged by even the simplest of follow-ups. When Pichai noted that roughly 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, no one bothered to ask how Google could ever possibly police it. There were no questions about YouTube’s recommendation algorithms or about YouTube as a vector of radicalization.