The Real Reason the Government Won’t Hold Big Tech Accountable
The villagers are marching with their torches and pitchforks. Big tech companies are in trouble.
The government is coming to regulate them.
Someone leaked a draft of an executive order from President Trump. It calls on various agencies to use all current laws to look into possible anticompetitive practices by Facebook and Google.
In fact, the EU already fined Google $5 billion in July for “abusing the market dominance of Android.” And now they’ve set their sights on how Amazon uses customer and seller data.
Elizabeth Warren wants to force Amazon to choose between providing a platform for sellers and selling goods. Echoing European Union regulators, she says Amazon has an unfair advantage by competing against the same sellers it collects information from on its platform.
Governments use antitrust laws to break up businesses that resemble monopolies. The government can call just about anything an “anticompetitive” practice. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 gives the US government sweeping powers to regulate almost any business behavior.
And there’s plenty to choose from:
- Google gets the vast majority of search engine users.
- Facebook is the go-to social media website.
- Together, Google ads and Facebook ads capture 90% of new advertising spending. They get 71% of all ad dollars in Europe.
- The left says Facebook’s lax data policies helped win Trump the election. The right claims Facebook targets conservatives for censorship.
- Google favors it’s own results, and censors certain news.
- Amazon collects almost half of all online retail sales in the US.
But much of the criticism misses the mark.
A Bloomberg article called Tech Giants Spend $80 Billion to Make Sure No One Else Can Compete, offers a perfect example of misplaced criticism:
How can a company hope to compete with Google’s driverless cars when it spends $20 billion a year to ensure it has the best laser-guided sensors and computer chips?
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