Other questions are more technical. An easy question with a hard answer: Who owns the content I upload to Instagram? (You do — except you have granted Instagram a license to use it for almost any purpose.) Is Instagram listening to me? Because these ads are kind of creeping me out. (No, but the company partners with other firms that collect information about your online behavior, so if for instance you talked about something, then searched for it on your phone in a different app, maybe it could end up helping Instagram serve an ad, so, well, yes, but not literally, no, it is not listening to your spoken words.) O.K., then, what about my Echo — is my Amazon Echo always listening to me? (No — well, only so it can hear when you say “Alexa.” So, yes?) So is my Echo listening when, for example, I’m having sex? (Again, no, only for the word “Alexa,” so, well, actually yes.)

The companies most vulnerable to easy questions tend to be the ones that can no longer be understood in terms of former competitors or current peers — because they don’t really have any. Google doesn’t have to worry about losing its users; it simply wants them to use Google more and to use more Google products. Vindicated by growth, these businesses take the liberty to redesign more of our online lives than any of us have asked for. As with Facebook, and to some extent now Amazon, there is no overarching pitch to its users beyond: Where else could you possibly go?

With impressive speed, companies founded to confront “intolerable” problems that it “must be possible to solve” have become intolerable in ways obvious to everyone but them. When Mark Zuckerberg was summoned in front of American and European lawmakers, the hardest questions to answer were some of the easiest to ask: Would Mr. Zuckerberg, whose company trades in such information, be comfortable sharing with the world the name of the hotel he stayed at last night, or the people he messaged with this week? (No, of course not.) How does Facebook make money? (An unilluminating “We run ads.”) Does Facebook have any competitors, really? (Sure, like ... email?)

There are companies that are mostly immune to the easy-question-hard-answer dynamic. Easy questions about Netflix, for one, tend to have easy answers: You pay; they stream. Most obvious questions about Apple can be answered by pointing out that it would like to sell you expensive items on a fairly regular basis. What these more straightforward companies have in common is that their founding questions doubled as consumer rallying cries — they asked, and continued to ask, about things that their customers need, or at least want, and tend to understand.

But for the rest of the tech giants, the easy questions have much harder answers. As these companies grew, they did more than just vanquish their competition. Their growth and free-service benevolence succeeded at making the very idea of competitors’ challenging their efforts — the industry’s traditional way to solve the problems they’ve created — seem unnecessary or even counterproductive. They’ve ducked the easy questions for so long that it’s reasonable to suspect that they doubt we will like the answers.