Public policy should have a role in adapting to a radically new and different technological landscape.
Public policy should have a role in adapting to a radically new and different technological landscape.
R obert H. Bork Jr. published a piece in Capital Matters this morning titled “Why Does Ted Cruz Buy Into Klobuchar’s Socialist Bill?” The “socialist bill” in question is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992), which was introduced by Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa). It’s a rare example of a viable bipartisan effort to rein in the power of Silicon Valley, and it boasts an ideologically diverse cross-section of co-sponsors.
The bill sailed through the Judiciary Committee, passing 16–6. Bork’s central objection is that Cruz was one of the 16 votes in its favor. The Texas senator “decries the humanitarian and economic ruin of his father’s homeland, Cuba, imposed by the most extreme (and perhaps inevitable) form of socialism,” Bork writes. So “how could it escape this inarguably bright man that he voted to bring a bill to the Senate floor that would subject American business to socialism and make Big Tech social-media companies more woke and dedicated to the censorship of conservatives than ever before?” He continues:
Klobuchar’s bill would also empower the state to go after social-media companies for dozens of vague infractions. Is there any doubt that the barons of Silicon Valley would be more alert than ever before to pleasing Washington’s progressive regulators, once they’re subject to being keelhauled by Washington at any time? At some point, as regulation blurs into ownership, the Klobuchar bill would treat these businesses as social properties to be politically managed.
This is one of the central arguments that one hears from opponents of public-policy interventions in Silicon Valley: It will hurt more than it will help. It’s worth taking seriously. But it’s not entirely clear why the AICOA is short-sighted and counterproductive, let alone an example of “socialism.” Indeed, Bork doesn’t even specify which “vague infractions” would “empower the state to go after social-media companies” under the bill’s proposed framework.
As for the bill’s potential to make “the barons of Silicon Valley . . . more alert than ever before to pleasing Washington’s progressive regulators”: Big Tech already is working hand-in-hand with progressive technocrats. That’s one of the main arguments some conservatives make for political intervention. In fact, powerful tech platforms and progressive political institutions are often run by the same people: “The Biden transition team has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics,” CNBC reported in December 2020. “It has also added to its staff several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign.” While the Biden administration has made some Big Tech–focused antitrust overtures, there is nonetheless a well-oiled pipeline between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party: As Ars Technica reported, a number of high-ranking Obama officials moved to take jobs in tech during the Trump years and transitioned back to the White House when Biden took office. It’s no wonder that 97 percent of donations from employees of Google and Facebook went to Biden’s 2020 campaign.
Bork worries that “at some point, as regulation blurs into ownership, the Klobuchar bill would treat these businesses as social properties to be politically managed.” But again, the intimate relationship between Democrats and Big Tech already is threatening to blur the line between government and private business. Jen Psaki, for example, infamously admitted that the Biden administration was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” on Covid back in July. Last month, U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that “we’ve got to recognize that our technology platforms, particularly social media, these have an important role to play” in “limiting the spread of misinformation.”
As David Harsanyi pointed out, the surgeon general’s “comments wouldn’t be as grating if it weren’t so obvious that the Biden administration has been pressuring Big Tech companies, who oversee huge swaths of our daily digital interactions, to limit speech.” Harsanyi himself maintains “that tech companies should enjoy unencumbered free-association rights.” But he acknowledges “that position becomes difficult to sustain if corporations that spend tens of millions every year in rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations simply take orders from the government on speech codes.”
In fact, contrary to Bork’s concerns about AICOA’s empowerment of progressive ideologues, the bill actually has very little to do with ideology or content-regulation. AICOA’s main focus is Big Tech’s anti-competitive behavior, seeking to bar tech giants from using their power to discriminate against smaller platforms and players. The proposed legislation does not wade into contentious debates over content moderation — at least not directly.
Bork isn’t convinced. “If progressives are willing to give something to Cruz with one hand, it’s likely they’ll take it away with another,” he writes. “At a time when Facebook is bleeding users and stock value, and inflation is rampant, this seems a strange time to play Russian roulette with the economy.” Another, more benign, way one could refer to the process of “giving something with one hand” and “taking away with another” is bipartisanship. Moreover, it’s odd to invoke Facebook’s declining user base and stock value as an argument against intervention. Bork argues that Facebook’s economic and cultural power is in decline — an open question, given Mark Zuckerberg’s recent foray into constructing an entirely new virtual reality. But even if Facebook is a waning institution, the platform remains a dominant force in American life.
The broader economic impact of the bill is an important consideration, to be sure. Opponents of AICOA and similar legislation argue that “self-preferencing often benefits consumers,” i.e., that tech platforms’ ability to discriminate against smaller companies on their own platforms actually maximizes consumer welfare in the long run. But maximized consumer welfare is not the singular criterion for effective policy-making. There are a range of opinions about the economic effects of checking Big Tech’s power. But the primary argument for such an initiative is civic. It’s about the shape of the modern public square.
When proponents of political interventions in Silicon Valley raise concerns about companies such as Twitter and Facebook stifling debate, the retort from many of their counterparts is often some variation of “build your own social-media platform.” But previous efforts to start other platforms have run up against the very anticompetitive practices that the AICOA intends to curb.
Gab, for example, was started as a free-speech alternative to Twitter. But it was quickly “booted from the Google Play app store in 2017, and never made it onto the iOS App Store,” Robert Mariani writes. From there, “GoDaddy, a domain-name registrar, stripped Gab of their domain name,” and “Stripe and PayPal, two of the largest payment processors in the world, terminated their relationship” with the platform. The same thing happened with Parler, a similarly ill-fated attempt to act on the “build your own Twitter” injunction. After the January 6 Capitol riot, Apple and Google kicked Parler from their app stores, and Amazon Web Services stopped hosting the fledgling platform altogether.
Gab came back online, but it did so via third-rate payment processors and web service hosts that have rendered it largely irrelevant. And its position in relation to mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Facebook make it an ugly hotbed of antisemitism and white nationalism — far from the kind of digital community that could ever be a viable competitor to legacy social-media companies. When Parler came back online, it was on Silicon Valley’s terms: Its new iPhone app blocks all posts that Apple prohibits.
Build your own platform . . . and your own app store, payment processor, web-service distributor, and domain-name registrar. Would that it were that simple.
The most thoughtful proponents of a more aggressive stance on Big Tech are the first to admit that there are any number of ways that such an endeavor could go wrong. Skeptics should reciprocate their charitability by engaging seriously with the basic point of Big Tech critics: that public policy should have a role in adapting to a radically new and different technological landscape. After all, if civil society allows powerful private actors to suppress and marginalize legitimate political speech from the public square, it’s not hard to imagine that a dismantling of the checks on government censorship that opponents of tech regulation invoke as a defense of their position will be next.