There can be clarifications and follow up questions. Can call someone back in to testify again, if need be. Or work with more expert witnesses.

Punishment means Congressional hearings - which are, to be fair, generally useless - become nothing but "I don't know but I can check with our teams later" responses.

Allowing the CEO of any company to present a factually false answer to Congress while representing the company and speaking from a position of expertise provides awfully perverse incentives for _every single CEO_ to misrepresent his company if there are no repercussions for provably false testimony.

The alternative seems worse. If there's never punishment for lies every unscrupulous person called to testify will provide whatever is in their best interests instead of providing the truth.

Also, this particular case is about testifying to congress. It's not a criminal trial in a court of law.

I didn't think I was being particularly obtuse but you seem to have missed the point: Providing provably false answers to Congress as part of sworn testimony should trigger prosecutors to look into perjury charges. Perjury is what we are talking about here and that has a mechanism: the legal system.

Yes, I think that a C level executive who comes to Congress and testifies confidently about something his business does and is wrong about it should trigger a potential prosecution.

This is about testifying to Congress and what happens when you say something provably false as an expert under Oath. If you are not certain of what you are testifying about, do not testify to it. If you are certain and wrong, you should be afraid of repercussions. Anything else opens up Pandora's Box.

Well, in this case, it should trigger congress to look into it, but I agree. And we know that happens because congress has done so in the past. Such an initial investigation would certainly (and correctly) be done quietly, and we're not likely to know about it unless that investigation determines that perjury may have actually happened.

But it's still testimony given under oath. AFAIK perjury is still applicable under those circumstances.

It may seem like a small difference, but it's pretty large in practice.

> willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true

Intent (“willfully”) matters.

If you believe the statement is true when you say it, it isn’t perjury. It’s just incorrect.

Yes, but whether you believed the statement was true when you said is not just a matter of your saying so. Other evidence can be brought to bear on the question: for example, as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, asking you how you came to believe that what you said was true, and you either admitting that you just made it up or had no good reason to believe it, or giving obviously false or evasive answers, or answers that are rebutted by other evidence (for example, you say you were told it by someone who denies that they did so). That could lead a jury in a perjury trial to conclude that in fact you were wilfully lying, even though you deny it.

That said, if someone is giving testimony that is intentionally deceptive such as lying and saying it was a mistake, making stuff up -- which is lying -- or even being deceptive without uttering an untruth, that is something that can be penalized.

The pros engage in perjury by just saying "I don't remember". It may be a lie, but good luck proving that.

Edit: these logical inversions made my ESL head spin a bit. The point was that "I do (not) know" is more readily falsifiable than "I do (not) remember".

Making stuff up is not the same as honestly making statements that you believe are correct, but which are actually wrong. In the latter case, the person (Pichai in this case) could give reasons why he held that belief (for example, so and so gave him a briefing on the feature and he understood them to be telling him X). In the former case (guessing), he wouldn't; he would have to admit under oath that he just made the stuff up. I don't know if that technically counts as perjury, but it certainly doesn't seem to be consistent with giving testimony under oath.

I believe that it does. Making stuff up is lying.

Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions. There is no duty to know what is going on, worse, there is a presumption that it is better to not even know.

> Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions.

They aren't[1]. This doesn't seem to be a case of someone rich and powerful getting away with lying.

[1] They may have the means to fight things in court to reduce their penalty for perjury, but that's not "carte blanche". Rich and powerful people do, in fact, get penalized for lying under oath. Just not 100% of the time.

His job is to run the company and take responsibility for it. If he doesn't know something illegal is going on, he is still at fault for not learning about it

But I believe what you meant is that under a different/hypothetical legal system, one which you believe to be closer to optimal, they should be found at fault.