In many of the right’s legacy institutions, the prospect of regulating or breaking up Big Tech is regarded as an affront to any number of long-standing principles, from limited government and free markets to property rights and free speech. A more activist government stance in combating internet censorship “would be a huge mistake, and a repudiation of conservative principles for several reasons,” worries Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Iain Murray. The Cato Institute’s Matt Feeney admonishes “some conservatives” who “claim to be supporters of free speech and the First Amendment all while seeking to undermine both” in their push to amend liability protections for platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Libertarian writer Yates Wilburn goes even further: Republicans singing the “siren song of big government moralism” on Big Tech have “abandoned nearly every conservative principle regarding free markets, limited government, and free speech in one fell swoop.”
But these arguments both misunderstand conservative principles and betray an ignorance of the conservative movement’s history. The resistance to any kind of political intervention in private monopolies of the public square relies heavily on the invocation of shallow Reagan-era slogans about small government and individual liberty, divorced from the traditional understanding of how or why those principles are rooted in a coherent national interest or a deeper common good. This is a distinctly modern perversion. In contrast to contemporary dogma, there is a long tradition of conservative public policy aimed at limiting the power of private communications media in the face of a changing technological landscape. In many ways, the ongoing debate over Big Tech is the reemergence of an intra-conservative rift that dates back to the 1980s: the battle over the Fairness Doctrine.
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