Big Tech in Washington: An Excerpt
This excerpt is from an upcoming article co-written by Jordan Shapiro and Dan Pye on Congressional evaluation of the problems in Big Tech and how to solve them.
The US House of Representatives' Antitrust Committee Hearing last month, interviewing the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon to question whether their supremacy has led to anti-competitive practices, was lauded by much of the mainstream and even tech media as a much-needed check on the growing and concerning the power of these giants. However, on more in-depth analysis, the unfocused and chaotic hearing, which freely conflated anti-trust concerns and the only loosely related issues of political bias, privacy, censorship, and so on, demonstrated just how far behind the times our government is. The de facto result of Congress's impotence is nothing less than the abdication of responsibility to the private sector in the face of a technologically changing world.
House subcommittee members, working off a reported 1.3 million pages of research, interviews, and internal business communications and documents, failed to levy legitimate, quantitatively substantiated questions (neither about anti-trust nor the other issues at hand). Instead, the bi-partisan committee preferred to cite singular instances of anecdotal rhetoric, pleased with themselves, and eager to declare a "mic drop" victory before the CEOs could even respond. Given the praise of both the media and the Congresspeople's self-congratulations, apparently, cherry-picked anecdotes from the report were damning proof that the companies are akin to the Robber Baron monopolies of the 19th century.
It's not that there aren't substantive dangers presented by the consolidation of power in big tech or that tech companies should not be subject to appropriate regulatory control. In their opening statements, three of the four CEOs (Pichai of Google, Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Cook of Apple), welcomed smart legislation and regulation. Speaking specifically to the regulation of political speech on social platforms, Zuckerberg said, "I personally don't believe that private companies should be making so many decisions about these issues by themselves."
This legislation should deal with the legitimate stifling of competition, freedom of speech, and data rights. Still, the levy of anti-trust at these companies goes against a fundamental understanding of what this type of regulation is supposed to do: protect consumers. In many important respects, consumers are not harmed by technologies' services on straight-forward, traditional monopolistic terms. All four of these companies have developed platforms that millions of Americans use to start entrepreneurial pursuits, gain valuable technology development skills, and access free services to boost their personal and professional productivity.
As the subcommittee should have done, let's separate anti-trust issues from other adverse side effects of the dominance of these companies (what economists call externalities).