Google and Facebook may finally be treed. A new, robust, and bipartisan consensus is appalled by the way “Big Tech” has used its monopoly power to turn the Internet into a toxic stew of disinformation, extremism, digital piracy, and crime, twisting the vision of an open Internet into a private preserve that exists only to pad the Silicon Valley bottom line. Whistleblowers are crawling out of the woodwork exposing the depths of Facebook’s knowing misdeeds and a mysterious outage cratered the company’s three largest services earlier this week wiping out 5% of its value in a single day and stranding over 3 billion users without access to social and communications channels they depend on for hours. No wonder over 80 percent of registered voters say the government should do everything it can to rein them in.
Our representatives are listening. Bipartisan legislation is moving through Congress to bring the wrath of anti-trust regulators down on the dominant technology platforms. Dozens of bipartisan state attorneys general, Justice Department litigators, and the Federal Trade Commission have joined the hunt.
The platforms’ long history of broken promises and overreaching has left them without a coherent argument in their defense. Which perhaps explains the shameless new PR campaign being waged by their DC lobbyists making the outlandish claim that reining in big tech would somehow threaten national security! Apparently, according to this line of thinking, platforms monopolies are actually good because they keep a Chinese technological challenge at bay.
Read Full Article »