The bipartisan Silicon Valley squeeze
No good deed goes unpunished, Silicon Valley CEOs mutter, as they watch much of the liberal commentariat and policy world turn against the Tech Titans, labeling them monopolists and destroyers of the news and civic culture. We give to the correct candidates, support the correct causes, and even fire the politically incorrect employees. Now our friends have turned on us, writing books and policy manifestos calling for beefed up antitrust and even raising the possibility of the corporate death penalty — the breakup.
Meanwhile, conservatives have finally had enough. As natural allies of these entrepreneurial firms, capitalist Republicans spent the last 15 years trying to build bridges to Silicon Valley, without much success. Despite Big Tech’s overwhelming financial support for Democrats, most Republicans admired these most innovative of American firms and resisted the temptation to retaliate. Now, however, conservative patience may finally have run out. They believe the Silicon Valley firms have become explicitly partisan entities — in politics and the culture wars.
Combine this partisanship with the overwhelming power to control information (as the Democrats charge), and you make a lot of people nervous. Some of this is political gamesmanship. But many serious conservatives and libertarians are sincerely concerned.
George Mason University professor Alex Tabarrok, for example, wonders why Google and Apple are blocking Gab, an alternative to Twitter that emphasizes free speech. The number of incidents where YouTube refused to publish mainstream conservative commentary and educational materials has grown, and conservatives have come to view it not as a glitch in Google’s system but a company policy. Tabarrok, echoing my own thoughts, summarizes the very deep problem:
I also fear that Google and Apple haven’t thought very far down the game tree. One of the arguments for leaving the meta-platforms alone is that they are facially neutral with respect to content. But if Google and Apple are explicitly exercising their power over speech on moral and political grounds then they open themselves up to regulation. If code is law then don’t be surprised when the legislators demand to write the code.
If Silicon Valley wants to do politics, politicians will be more than happy to do tech. This is not an outcome many conservatives and libertarians relish, but neither is unilateral disarmament.
One irony is that Silicon Valley spent the last 15 years supporting very hypothetical scare narratives about internet service providers (ISPs). ISPs were the key gatekeepers of information and, they insisted, monopolists who were likely to block or throttle competitive content or inconvenient speech. The tech firms succeeded in parlaying this story into Title II net neutrality regulations imposed on the ISPs. It was a solution in search of a problem. The fact is, the blocking and throttling never emerged. The ISPs, moreover, never had nearly the insight into the actual content of data traveling across networks, compared to Silicon Valley’s deep knowledge. In hindsight, it looks like a classic case of projection.
This drama will unfold over the next decade. For now, the take away for me is not that breaking up or regulating the Tech Titans is right. One take away is that the dominant narrative of the last 15 years was wrong.
Bret Swanson is a visiting fellow at AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy and president of Entropy Economics LLC, a strategic research firm specializing in technology, innovation, and the global economy. He advises investors and technology companies, focusing on the Internet ecosystem and the broadband networks and applications that drive it. Swanson is also a scholar at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, where, since 2005, his research has centered on economic growth and policies that encourage it. For eight years Swanson advised technology investors as executive editor of the Gilder Technology Report and later was a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, where he directed the Center for Global Innovation. Swanson began his career as an aide to former senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and was then an economic analyst for former representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) at Empower America.
