Hey Big Tech: Joe’s Just Not That Into You. And Seriously, You Guys Could Break Up.
Recent moves by the Biden White House could spell big trouble for the Big Four.
Big Tech is wincing hard today. To the cheers of progressives who are opposed to outsized power in the hands of giant tech companies, Biden announced the nomination of Lina Khan to a coveted position on the Federal Trade Commission. This is the fourth recent move by the new administration that is likely to cause raised eyebrows in Silicon Valley and Seattle—along with long strategy calls to D.C. lobbyists.
Khan is a young but rising legal scholar at Columbia University known for her staunch antitrust bona fides. She was previously a fellow at the FTC where she argued for clearer company rules for violations of anti-competition laws. She then served as an aide to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee’s probe into practices by tech companies including the Big Four: Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. In that 16-month investigation, Khan focused on Google’s power within the online search market.
“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said in an interview with the New York Times. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”
Khan’s appointment follows that of progressive darling Tim Wu last week to the National Economic Council. Wu is a Columbia law professor and one of the biggest and most vocal critics of the platforms’ oversized influence. In his 2018 book The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Wu compared our current economy to that of the late 1800s, arguing that the concentration of power results in extreme economic inequality and national suffering, which inevitably leads to calls for more nationalistic and extremist leadership. The White House apparently was listening.
“I worked in the Obama administration, and I worked in antitrust, so I will take some personal blame here, but we have not provided the merger oversight we should have,” Wu admitted in an interview in 2019. “[M]aybe sometimes we had an overly rosy view” of the tech sector, he added.
President Biden himself has taken recent direct aim at the big platforms, siding publicly with workers in their union organizing effort at Amazon in Alabama and warning against intimidation of workers leading up to the vote—an endorsement and a threat without recent precedent for the White House. And in remarks to the New York Times, Biden has indicated his strong antipathy to Section 230, the provision that exempts distributors of online content from liability for the defamatory or false statements of third parties on their sites. Biden says he would like to see the provision repealed, though some observers believe this would create real problems for the modern internet and may just be a threat by the White House to compel reform by the platforms of their content moderation practices and their audience algorithms.
Together, these two progressive appointments and two bold statements from the president form a strong narrative: The new Biden administration will not be renewing the love affair the Obama White House had with Big Tech. Biden has faulted companies like Facebook and Google for their role in the 2016 election fiasco as well as for the political polarization we face today. In the view of the new president, too much power and money in the hands of a few is bad for the economy, bad for our politics, and bad for our collective future. This thinking underlies the American Rescue Plan, which provides a historically huge boost to the poorest Americans instead of leaving more money in the hands of corporations and top earners, as the Trump tax cut had. Biden is expected to sign that into law this week.
With these two appointments, a key remaining piece of the puzzle still remains to be solved. Who will head up the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice? That decision could be pivotal to a question the Big Four are no doubt now asking: Will there be a concerted action within the administration to break them up? If Khan and Wu exert their influence as expected, then this possibility, once nearly unthinkable, is most certainly on the table.
She is right though. Big techs all becoming too powerful. Even companies like T-Mobile who were nothing 15 years ago now bought out Sprint. Nobody should be having dominance over the world or even one country.