Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol, May 10, 2023.
Progressive Democrats are going after monopoly platforms like Google, Apple, and Facebook because they invade privacy, take no responsibility for content, pervert trade policy to undermine domestic safeguards, and use their privileged knowledge to compete against outside vendors on their platforms. But many Republicans, who are usually anti-regulation, are also against Big Tech.
Why? Several reasons, both opportunistic and principled. Silicon Valley tends to donate to Democrats. The monopolies also promote perverse forms of supposed social liberalism via social media, as well as screw independent and smaller businesses. And fake news is beginning to backfire on right as well as left.
Who said this?: “I have heard too many stories from families who feel helpless in the face of Big Tech. Stories about children being bullied to the point of committing suicide. Human trafficking. Exploitation of minors. All the while the social media platforms look the other way.”
That would be Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. This week, Graham co-sponsored the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Recognizing that responsibility for regulating the platform monopolies is fragmented and ineffective, their bill would create a new regulatory agency to police the biggest tech platforms, protect consumers, promote competition, secure privacy, guard national security, and prevent harm online. Dominant digital platforms would be required to get licenses from the government to operate, as broadcasters currently do, and would lose their licenses for repeated violations of law.
The bill would also require transparent terms of service and ban monopolistic tactics such as self-preferencing. It would include an outright prohibition on conflicts of interest such as Amazon both owning the marketplace and competing as a vendor on its platform—reflecting long-standing common-carrier principles. The new commission would work closely with the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department to review market power and proposed acquisitions, as well as past ones.
It would have extensive protections of privacy for users. Dominant platforms would also be prohibited from having computer operations in countries that posed security risks.
To review these mandates is to appreciate all that is problematic about Big Tech. As Warren and Graham wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, “Americans deserve to know how their data is collected and used and to control who can see it. They deserve the freedom to opt out of targeted advertising. And they deserve the right to go online without, say, some A.I. tool’s algorithm denying them a loan based on their race or politics.”
This improbable alliance has one other huge benefit. Opponents of Trump and Trumpism have hoped that they can rally traditional Republicans as a political counterweight. This has gone nowhere, because the hardcore Trump base intimidates the rest of the electoral field. But maybe there is another path.
As the common qualms about Big Tech suggest, there are areas where libertarian conservative values and progressive values converge. The tendency of rampant capitalism to crowd out everything else that matters is one of them.
The road back from Trumpism may be an indirect one—finding our way back to values we have in common as Americans and creating coalitions of social decency.
