Common Carriage Now

During the early Trump years, we saw people like Alex Jones de-platformed by the tech companies. But many, at the time, figured that it was fair to toss “fringe” characters like Jones under the bus, and that fears about a “slippery slope” of cancellation were overblown. They were wrong. Similarly, James Damore’s July 2017 memo about Google’s diversity/woke practices was another warning sign about exacerbating rot within the technology industry, but few bothered to so much as raise an eyebrow.

During his first year as a senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri started to talk about, and propose policies about, Big Tech, in a way that was different than the way politicians of the Right had previously discussed the issue. Initially, suggestions for reform revolved around Section 230 and antitrust; those certainly remain hot topics of discussion today. The discussion of common carrier regulation, which I’ll get to in a bit, came only a bit later.

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