Posted on 04/09/2021 4:41:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
A realignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the "Somewheres," to borrow the term from David Goodhart's 2017 book, "The Road to Somewhere," which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the "Anywheres" -- those highly educated, mobile, "woke" elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class.
The Big Tech issue is the tip of the spear of the realignment. As has been made painfully obvious the last few years, with last October's collusive Big Tech assault on the New York Post for its election-season reporting on Hunter Biden's overseas travails serving as an eye-opening pinnacle, Big Tech is now the ruling class's catspaw. These modern-day robber barons are willing and able to lend their censorious assistance to the ruling class's ruthless entrenchment of its ideological and political hegemony. Big Tech, in short, is the leading private-sector appendage with which the Anywheres cow into submission and subjugate the Somewheres.
This emergent reality has caused no shortage of heart palpitations among some of the more "liberal" elements of the American conservative firmament. Conservatives, many were taught, stand for unadulterated laissez faire and a staunch commitment to deregulating corporate America. What to do, then, when those unshackled big corporations turn around and come after us?
The answer, for many, has been to carefully reassess what exactly it is we stand for as conservatives -- especially as it pertains to unaccountable, concentrated corporate titans who control the 21st-century equivalents of the old public square. To wit, there is nothing particularly "conservative" about a zealous, dogmatic refusal to countenance state actions that might better channel the content curation and moderation decisions of a behemoth such as Amazon -- which has at least an 80% market share in digital books -- toward the common good of the American polity. Ditto Google, which has a nearly 90% market share in online search.
But the historical bromance between the GOP and chamber of commerce-style corporatism has been an obstinate hindrance to reform. Big Tech-skeptical, pro-realignment conservatives have all too often had their legal and policy arguments on such issues as antitrust enforcement and Section 230 reform thrown back in their faces by doctrinaire, limited-government enthusiasts who insist that True Conservatism is synonymous with hands-off private-sector fundamentalism. "Build your own Google!" the corporatists and libertarians have scowled.
On Monday, the most important conservative lawyer in the nation, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, came out swinging on the side of the reformers. In his concurrence in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute, Thomas opined: "Today's digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties." Later, after a discussion of the centurieslong history of "common carrier" regulation -- in modern times, most often applied to transportation networks like rail and communications networks like telephony -- and places of "public accommodation," Thomas wrote: "There is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of accommodation to be regulated in this manner."
Seemingly speaking directly to regulators and legislators at both the federal and state level, Thomas also added, "If the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked: laws that restrict the platform's right to exclude." Seldom is a Supreme Court justice clearer and more forthright than that. Finally, in a footnote toward the end of his concurrence, Thomas implied that Section 230 immunity may itself be constitutionally problematic and violative of the First Amendment.
With the imprimatur of America's greatest living conservative -- who happens to be one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever -- the path forward for the Big Tech-skeptical right is clear. We can and must use all tools necessary in our policy and legal arsenal to rein in the Big Tech oligarchs before it is too late. Section 230 reform and antitrust enforcement against the most egregious offenders of concentrated power, such as Google and Amazon, are fine places to begin. But as Thomas urges, and as many of us have argued at least since the New York Post hullabaloo last October, we should think even bigger than that. It's time to get serious about applying "common carrier" regulatory frameworks and/or "public accommodation" Civil Rights Act statutory frameworks, and to reclaim our self-governing democracy from the Silicon Valley technocracy before it is too late.
It is ironic the Tech Oligarch dominance arose from the break-up of the telephone monopoly.
There are always unintended consequences. The question becomes how do you put the genie back in the bottle? Anti-trust and RICO prosecutions in the courts? Legislation? The Constitution alone will not save us as free speech is only protected from government interference.
If I were a pointy-headed libertarian, I’d say that we would NEVER touch the tech companies, but should instead come up with our own companies - companies that are free of politics.
But since we’ll lose the country, and what’s left of our freedoms long before we’re able to compete with the tech companies at a reasonable level (if it’s even possible), I say SCREW THAT, and let’s first STOP the tech companies from doing anymore damage.
Much more than the “Tech Oligarch” emerged from the break up of AT&T in 1984.
* * *
Yes, we can almost say that “Tech” itself arose from this event. MCI was up against the monopoly phone company that was AT&T. MCI moved into Washington DC and put on full-court press to influence policy makers.
Even still, MCI probably wouldn’t have survived were it not for a key investment of another titan, IBM, who brought MCI from the brink. A couple decades later, IBM slowed and was displaced by Oracle, and now the cloud.
Freeing up the communications market brought on the tech revolution. Personal computers were crude machines, but then the internet and then broadband arrived and transformed the world. Then the iPhone took things to a wholly new level after that.
Today the AT&Ts and Verizons are powerful companies in their own right (in the Fortune 50) but their influence is not much compared to Google, Amazon, and Apple.
Applications of antitrust law are a separate issue, and there are legitimate ways to push back against social media platforms on that front. But any time a conservative judge uses the term "public accommodation" in a piece like this, all kinds of alarm bells ring inside my head. Statutes that regulate "public accommodations" are some of the most blatantly unconstitutional laws in the U.S. today.
The rage over political control and free speech is certainly justified. And I like Clarence Thomas’ approach. Stop them from excluding people. That hits Big Tech in the right place and doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don’t believe for one minute that a Jeff Bezos nor Bill Gates will allow Xiden, the Woke and diverrrrr-sity crowd to run their companies. Sure, they will pay lip service to them, but never allow them to achieve true control.
Already there are tremendous competitive forces at play that put all Tech companies on a roller coaster ride. The leading e-commerce company in Japan, Rakuten, will be a force to be reckoned with. They are moving full-steam ahead to also be a mobile telecom provider using a new technology, Open RAN (Radio Access Network) which allows them to cut 30% off the cost of running a mobile network. Watch that company. Amazon certainly is.
The combined powers of low cost computing, clouds, global networks that you provision a month at a time, private networks, and the sheer dog-eat-dog mentality of tech innovation and markets will take a toll on Big Tech’s monopoly. Small Tech is right around the corner and will eventually gain ground.
Companies like Facebook are desperate to move into e-commerce where Amazon leads in. Facebook lost in the U.S., so battle is being waged in markets like India where even Amazon hasn’t been able to gain traction yet after massive investments.
So I like Clarence Thomas’ suggestion to pass laws that don’t allow parties to be excluded. Makes a lot of sense, and it’s a relatively “light touch” solution that still permits the marvelous societal advances that Big Tech has enabled in the last 20 years.
Already done with telephone companies.
They were forbidden to discriminate based on content.
I recall an old AT&T employee explaining how he was forbidden from even reporting illegal activity he heard on the phone while working on the system.
Do you think it would be a good thing if an oligopoly of phone service carriers conspired to put out-of-business the half (or more in this case) of business owners, and cause the firing of individuals whose political leanings did not match the leanings of the communist and fascist owners of the phone carriers?
How about the electric, or water companies? Can they shut off the power or water to homes with a Trump sign in the yard?
It might become the norm. They did not hesitate to use this method with those who would defy the Covid mandate orders.
“The government has no right...”
Citizens should be taught the GOVERNMENT has any right it wishes to impose upon its citizens. Like the days of old, government is the only entity entitled to RIGHTS.
Sad, but true.
So the comparison would be that internet service providers cannot discriminate based on content, but websites/platforms like Twitter that use the internet certainly can.
The telecom regulations that prohibit telephone companies from discriminating based on content don't prevent any of the customers of these companies from blocking phone numbers.
You wouldn't want someone using government regulations to force Free Republic to accept posts from DU nitwits, would you?
And think of how absurd it would be to have the government force newspapers to print op-ed pieces or letters to the editor.
It is much closer to the railroads than the phone network.
I would love to see competition solve the problem. But the existing tech oligarchs have shown themselves to be extremely adept at stopping competition.
The problem we have is we may not have enough time for competition to work.
The irony in all this is that in a digital age, "customers" should really have no such power because the cost of entry is very low. Building a new steel mill along a railroad costs a fortune. You could probably get a half-dozen smart IT geeks to develop a credible competitor to Twitter or Facebook in a garage over the course of several weeks.
The results we see show you are wrong about this.
Just consider what happened to Parler.
It took 20- 30 years for Google and Facebook to develop their position of oligopoly.
With their ability to rig elections, we don't have 20 years for an alternate to develop.
They can rig an election simply by manipulating search results.
Imagine a scenario where we had 500 different network and cable news channels and one of them was able to capture 80% of the viewing audience.
1. Would this be a "problem" that needs to be addressed?
2. In the absence of any illegal conduct on the part of the dominant news channel to suppress its competitors, what legal mechanisms would be available to "fix" this problem?
3. What legal mechanisms would you even WANT the government to have at its disposal to "fix" this problem? Again -- I go back to the scenario where the same government that regulates Twitter or Facebook as a "public accommodation" would also be empowered to turn Free Republic into Democratic Underground.
There is plenty of information which can be used to show violation of anti-trust laws.
The removal of 230 immunity has not even been tried.
There is likely plenty of illegal conduct on the part of the Tech Oligarchs.
There has been little desire to find it.
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