Big Tech Shamelessly Hides Behind 'National Security'
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. 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.
What? The claim that regulating Facebook and Google will hurt our national security is beyond grotesque coming from companies that are now the primary vector for vaccine deniers, bogus COVID cures, and the electoral “Big Lie.” Thanks to these companies’ massive datamining and targeted advertising and promotion practices, millions of American citizens have been served up on a platter to foreign manipulators, domestic fraudsters, and ransomware crime rings. Far from protecting us from China or any other adversary, the platforms enable foreign efforts to infiltrate and undermine our society — from Russia, Iran, and, of course, China itself.
No wonder a real intelligence expert — Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel to the NSA — argues reining in Big Tech is needed for national security. And President Obama’s former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler similarly rejects the claim that regulating tech weakens national security because “a competitive marketplace drives innovation (and national security) better than a monopoly.”
Yet the Big Tech White Paper (and a similar letter sent by a dozen former national security officials with own ties to the website giants) claims we need to preserve Facebook and Google as champions of innovation and warns breaking them up would reduce research, development, and innovation.
In fact, the opposite is true. If we were to break these monopolies into competitive companies, as we did AT&T forty years ago, stronger new competitors would arise and we’d see a gusher of new products, services, and technologies as well as challenges to Big Tech’s current, monolithic dominance. Every freshman economics student knows competition works and has worked, from Standard Oil to AT&T.
In other places the tech White Paper reads like the disinformation you expect to find on Facebook not hear from Facebook. It argues the legislation in the Congress only applies to American companies while foreigners are “exempt.” Wrong. The bill in Congress sets a consistent standard based on number of users and market capitalization that would apply to TikTok just as it does Google.
Tech’s mouthpieces also claim the legislation could “lead to forced IP transfers to foreign competitors” and compel “platforms to share sensitive or protected user data.” After spending years and millions of dollars fighting proposals that would protect user data and American intellectual property, the platforms’ newfound concern for privacy, copyright, and patent doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Indeed, Facebook itself has transferred reams of user data to bad actors in the past — have we already forgotten Cambridge Analytica — and “effectively exempted” major business partners from its claimed promise to never share user’s information. All while Facebook and Google scrape content from local newspapers and have all but extinguished them.
Imagine a world in which Google’s colossal step-child, Youtube, and Google’s ventures into travel, shopping, and other enterprises had to stand on their own merits rather than leveraging the headstart of everything Google already knows about you. What if Instagram competed against Facebook rather than propping it up? Who knows what competitors might emerge if every enterprise had to make it on their own rather than taking monopoly shortcuts?
“White papers” and “white lies” don’t cut it. A competitive Internet won’t threaten America or hand the keys to the internet to China or anyone else. It would strengthen our economy, promote new services and innovation, and put market forces to work helping us continue winning the global tech competition. If Big Tech wants to head off the rising call for progress and change, they’ll have to do better than this.
Ev Ehrlich is a former Undersecretary of Commerce and President of ESC Company.
