Matt Stoller offers an update on this case. Is it really about Google prioritizing certain viewpoints?
Many Republicans believe that progressives are running Google or other big firms, and these executives are making censorship choices about how to elect more Democrats or foist health choices on the public. They do this, so goes the theory, even if it means making less money. While it’s certainly the case that plenty of conservatives get knocked off big tech platforms, so do many others with all sorts of viewpoints (like pro-choice advocates marketing abortion pills on Instagram). More importantly, Google executives are heavily motivated by money, and they would vastly prefer not to have to deal with difficult censorship decisions that amount to which politically powerful customers to piss off.
What is really happening is that these firms are trying to monopolize a market, and then exploit their resulting power to generate cash. Only, in speech or cultural markets, fostering a monopoly means not only that you are able to extract profits. It also means, willingly or no, you become a powerful influence over speech. Large publishing houses choose who gets published and who doesn’t, and that confers significant power. The more dominant the publishing house, the more power. Search engines or social networks are vastly more concentrated, but a similar dynamic exists. Once you control society’s single search engine or social network, editorial choices, whichever direction they lead, help determine what is heard in the public square. So what these executives are doing isn’t trying to censor, but trying to ensure that they have market power in targeted advertising, search advertising or book sales. They simply end up as speech police, because that’s what it means when you build a monopoly that can determine who gets to be heard and who doesn’t.
