Factions comprising a majority of the public want to see SOMETHING done to curb the power of Big Tech, particularly Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter. The apprehensions center around market power, censorship, and political influence, and many of us share all of those concerns. The solutions proposed thus far generally fall into the categories of antitrust action and legislative changes with the intent to protect free speech, but it is unlikely that anything meaningful will happen under the current administration. That would probably require an opposition super-majority in Congress. Meanwhile, some caution the problem is blown out of proportion and that we should not be too eager for government to intervene. 

Competition

There are problems with almost every possible avenue for reining in the tech oligopolies. From a libertarian perspective, the most ideal solution to all dimensions of this problem is organic market competition. Unfortunately, the task of getting competitive platforms off the ground seems almost insurmountable. In social media, the benefits to users of a large, incumbent network are nearly overwhelming. That’s well known to anyone who’s left Facebook and found how difficult it is to gain traction on other social media platforms. Hardly anyone you know is there!

Google is the dominant search engine by far, and the reasons are not quite as wholesome as the “don’t-be-evil” mantra goes. There are plenty of other search engines, but some are merely shells using Google’s engine in the background. Others have privacy advantages and perhaps more balanced search results than Google, but with relatively few users. Google’s array of complementary offerings, such as Google Maps, Street View, and Scholar, make it hard for users to get away from it entirely.

Amazon has been very successful in gaining retail market share over the years. It now accounts for an estimated 50% of retail e-commerce sales in the U.S., according to Statista. That’s hardly a monopoly, but Amazon’s scale and ubiquity in the online retail market creates massive advantages for buyers in terms of cost, convenience, and the scope of offerings. It creates advantages for online sellers as well, as long as Amazon itself doesn’t undercut them, which it is known to do. As a buyer, you almost have to be mad at them to bother with other online retail platforms or shopping direct. I’m mad, of course, but I STILL find myself buying through Amazon more often than I’d like. But yes, Amazon has competition.

Anti-Trust

Quillette favors antitrust action against Big Tech. Amazon and Alphabet are most often mentioned in the context of anti-competitive behavior, though the others are hardly free of complaints along those lines. Amazon routinely discriminates in favor of products in which it has a direct or indirect interest, and Google discriminates in favor of its own marketplace and has had several costly run-ins with EU antitrust enforcers. Small businesses are often cited as victims of Google’s cut-throat business tactics.

The Department of Justice filed suit against Google in October, 2020 for anti-competitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising businesses. The main thrust of the charges are:

• Exclusivity agreements prohibiting preinstallation of other search engines;
• Tying arrangements forcing preinstallation of Google and no way to delete it;
• Suppressing competition in advertising;

There are two other antitrust cases filed by state attorneys general against Google alleging monopolistic practices benefitting its own services at the expense of sellers in various lines of business. All of these cases, state and federal, are likely to drag on for years and the outcomes could take any number of forms: fines, structural separation of different parts of the business, and divestiture are all possibilities. Or perhaps nothing. But I suppose one can hope that the threat of anti-trust challenges, and of prolonged battles defending against such charges, will have a way of tempering anti-competitive tendencies, that is, apart from actual efficiency and good service.

These cases illustrate the fundamental tension between our desire for successful businesses to be rewarded and antitrust. As free market economists such as Murray Rothbard have said, there is something “arbitrary and capricious” about almost any anti-trust action. Legal thought on the matter has evolved to recognize that monopoly itself cannot be viewed as a crime, but the effort to monopolize might be. But as Rothbard asserted, claims along those lines tend to be rather arbitrary, and he was quite right to insist that the only true monopoly is one granted by government. In this case, many conservatives believe Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the enabling legislation. But that is something anti-trust judgements cannot rectify.

Revoking Immunity

Section 230 gives internet service providers immunity against prosecution for any content posted by users on their platforms. While this provision is troublesome (see below), it is not at all clear why it might have encouraged monopolization, especially for web search services. At the time of the Act’s passage, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had barely begun work on Backrub, the forerunner to Google. Several other search engines had already existed and others have sprung up since then with varying degrees of success. Presumably, all of them have benefitted from Section 230 immunity, as have all social media platforms: not just Facebook, but Twitter, MeWe, Gab, Telegram, and others long forgotten, like MySpace.

Nevertheless, while private companies have free speech rights of their own, Section 230 confers undeserved protection against liability for the tech giants. That protection was predicated on the absence of editorial positioning and/or viewpoint curation of content posted by users. Instead, Section 230 often seems designed to put private companies in charge of censoring the kind of speech that government might like to censor. Outright repeal has been used as a threat against these companies, but what would it accomplish? The tech giants insist it would mean even more censorship, which is likely to be the result. 

Other Legislative Options

Other legislative solutions might hold the key to establishing true freedom of speech on the internet, a project that might have seemed pointless a decade ago. Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute suggested the social media giants might be treated as common carriers or made accountable under laws on public accommodation. This seems reasonable in light of the strong network effects under which social media platforms operate as “public squares.” Common carrier law or a law designating a platform as a public accommodation would prohibit the platform from discriminating on the basis of speech.

I do not view such restrictions in the same light as so-called net neutrality, as some do. The latter requires carriers of data to treat all traffic equally in terms of priority and pricing of network resources, despite the out-sized demands created by some services. It is more of a resource allocation issue and not at all like managing traffic based on its political content.

The legislation contemplated by free speech activists with respect to big tech has to do with prohibiting viewpoint discrimination. That could be accomplished by laws asserting protections similar to those granted under the so-called Fairness Doctrine. As Daniel Oliver explains:

“A law prohibiting viewpoint discrimination (Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has introduced one such bill) would be just as constitutional as the Fairness Doctrine, an FCC policy which adjusted the overall balance of broadcast programming, or the Equal Time Rule, which first emerged in the Radio Act of 1927 and was established by the Communications Act of 1934. Under such a law, a plaintiff could sue for viewpoint discrimination. That plaintiff would be someone whose message had been suppressed by a tech company or whose account had been blocked or cancelled….”

Ron DeSantis just signed a new law giving the state of Florida or individuals the right to sue social media platforms for limiting, altering or deleting content posted by users, as well as daily fines for blocking candidates for political office. It will be interesting to see whether any other states pass similar legislation. However, the fines amount to a pittance for the tech giants, and the law will be challenged by those who say it compels speech by social media companies. That argument presupposes an implicit endorsement of all user content, which is absurd and flies in the face of the very immunity granted by Section 230. 

Justice Thomas went to pains to point out that when the government restricts a platform’s “right to exclude,” the accounts of public officials can more clearly be delineated as public forums. But in an act we wouldn’t wish to emulate, the government of Nigeria just shut down Twitter for blocking President Buhari’s tweet threatening force against rebels in one part of the country. Still, any law directly restricting a platform’s editorial discretion must be enforceable, whether that involves massive financial penalties for violations or some other form of discipline.

Private Action

There are private individuals who care enough about protecting speech online to do something about it. For example, these tech executives are fighting against internet censorship. You can also complain directly to the platforms when they censor content, and there are ways to react to censored posts by following prompts — tell them the information provided on their decision was NOT helpful and why. You can follow and support groups like the Media Research Center and its Censor Track service, or the Internet Accountability Project. Complain to your state and federal legislators about censorship and tell them what kind of changes you want to see. Finally, if you are serious about weakening the grip of the Big Tech, ditch them. Close your accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Stop using Google. Cancel your Prime membership. Join networks that are speech friendly and stick it out.

Individual action and a sense of perspective are what Katherine Mangu-Ward urges in this excellent piece:

“Ousted from Facebook and Twitter, Trump has set up his own site. This is a perfectly reasonable response to being banned—a solution that is available to virtually every American with access to the internet. In fact, for all the bellyaching over the difficulty of challenging Big Tech incumbents, the video-sharing app TikTok has gone from zero users to over a billion in the last five years. The live audio app Clubhouse is growing rapidly, with 10 million weekly active users, despite being invite-only and less than a year old. Meanwhile, Facebook’s daily active users declined in the last two quarters. And it’s worth keeping in mind that only 10 percent of adults are daily users of Twitter, hardly a chokehold on American public discourse.

Every single one of these sites is entirely or primarily free to use. Yes, they make money, sometimes lots of it. But the people who are absolutely furious about the service they are receiving are, by any definition, getting much more than they paid for. The results of a laissez-faire regime on the internet have been remarkable, a flowering of innovation and bountiful consumer surplus.”

Conclusion

The fight over censorship by Big Tech will continue, but legislation will almost certainly be confined to the state level in the short-term. It might be some time before federal law ever recognizes social media platforms as the public forums most users think they should be. Federal legislation might someday call for the wholesale elimination of Section 230 or an adjustment to its language. A more direct defense of First Amendment rights would be strict prohibitions of online censorship, but that won’t happen. Instead, the debate will become mired in controversy over appropriate versus inappropriate moderation, as Mangu-Ward alludes. Antitrust action should always be viewed with suspicion, though some argue that it is necessary to establish a more competitive environment, one in which free speech and fair search-engine treatment can flourish.

Organic competition is the best outcome of all, but users must be willing to vote with their digital feet, as it were, rejecting the large tech incumbents and trying new platforms. And when you do, try to bring your friends along with you!

Note: This post also appears at The American Reveille.