Antitrust Victory

Good news, reported by Matt Stoller:

The problem is not convincing voters that monopolies are a problem. They already believe that. The problem is convincing them that doing something about these problems is possible. This fatalism also shows up in conversations with policymakers, businesspeople, and workers. There are any number of comments you’d recognize making this point. Congress is corrupt. Big tech is too powerful. Washington is broken. Big money runs everything. The government works for big business. Essentially, the case for concentrated corporate power is that, well, they are simply too entrenched to overcome.

Well yesterday, the anti-monopoly political movement showed that it is possible to use our political system to fight concentrated power. In a shocking action, the House passed a provision to strengthen antitrust laws by a vote of 242-184. Google, Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and various big tech funded trade associations opposed this bill, and Republican leaders like Jim Jordan and Silicon Valley Democrats Zoe Lofgren fought it bitterly. But they lost. And this is very weird to write, because Google never loses in legislative votes. Ever. But they did yesterday.

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Rumble’s Antitrust Suit Against Google

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.

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