Conservatives love extolling the wonders of capitalism and free markets as a panacea for almost any malady. Their faith is warranted in a lot of cases—but a lot more than that will be required to rein in the New Oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
Something must be done to restrain their liberal excesses and expose their manipulative meddling in the information flow and political discourse of millions of Americans. Google, Facebook, and Twitter wield three formidable assets that make them all but impervious to any real competitive challenge: a dominant global platform, a clear and abiding lib bias plied without reservation, and the awesome power and the willingness to crush new entrants onto their turf.
At the same time, these are the New Oligarchs by default. No one checked their rise. We, the American people, and our leaders have only ourselves to blame for letting these hopelessly woke companies dominate our online lives and take over the internet.
The Congress of the United States is tremulous when confronted by a single one of these supertech entities. Most members of Congress failed to grasp their business models and how they managed to forge an oligopoly across businesses beyond tech and into news media, video entertainment, book publishing, online retail, job search, email, and more.
The immense business success of tech in Silicon Valley and beyond owes only in part to innovation and a preternatural sense of Darwinian competition. Big tech also relies on a quivering regulatory regime. This particularly is true at the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). And Microsoft, a survivor of a government antitrust breakup bid in the late 1990s. Federal agencies stop short of trying, in any way, to assert national interests against the powerful interests of big tech.
Why the reluctance? Because, in many ways, the online platforms have become vital to the very people who otherwise might want to rein in their predatory and anticompetitive modus operandi: congressmen, senators, regulators, and the mainstream media across the entire political spectrum.
The old advice to politicians on taking on newspapers was to never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton. Today few politicians want to pick a fight with the giants that possess the pixels. President Trump, intrinsically and characteristically, was willing to do that.
The reluctance to take on big tech also is shared by the mainstream media. They were largely silent on the looming influence of the big tech trio, in part because they all shared an ardent liberal outlook and an antipathy for President Trump.
The Fourth Estate is, without question, in ruins. The national left-wing media have cratered under the weight of their political bias and the loss of billions of dollars in ad revenue to their online successors. Local news is near extinction. Social media, meanwhile, are ascendant—and the frail national media are more reliant than ever on Google, Facebook, and Twitter for their circulation and profile.
Can the New York Times really risk launching a deep investigative report on the threat to democracy posed by the bias of the three social media giants?
Yet if big tech is so terrible, the opportunity should be wide open for someone to build something better. Like the argument for free trade with foreign countries, this view breaks down in practice.
In the old Silicon Valley, the heavyweights welcomed the fledglings and cheered their rise. In today’s meaner clime, the Valley is hostile to innovation and start-ups. The giants buy or crush newcomers. They hold enormous market share in multiple areas with the ability to bar new competitors—and they do so whenever it suits them.
In the eight years of the Obama administration, Google grew more than fourfold, from $21.8 billion in annual sales in 2008 to $89.98 billion in 2016. It shifted from being just a search engine company to being a dominant email provider (Gmail has more than 1.5 billion users), the owner of the number one and number two websites in the world (Google and YouTube, respectively), and a provider to thousands of schools filled with future customers.
Your children or grandchildren might be completing their lockdown schoolwork using Google Classroom. They might do their homework via Google Docs, a “free” word processing program that the internet giant actively monitors.
Every day, Google runs 3.5 billion online searches for users around the world. Its search rankings can make or break a business. It controls 85 percent of the worldwide search market. Its Android software runs a massive 75 percent of the worldwide market for smartphones. Apple’s iOS runs 24 percent, so together the two oligarchs own 99 percent of the global market for the most dynamic, most personal technology product ever.
If Apple and Google deny your app admission to their app stores, they just blocked you from connecting with 99 percent of the smartphone customers in the world.
Facebook has 1.6 billion daily mobile users and 2.3 billion monthly mobile users globally. In the United States, it holds collectively almost half a billion overlapping accounts: 190 million Facebook “friends,” 107 million users of Instagram (of 1 billion worldwide), 68 million users on WhatsApp (of 1.5 billion worldwide).
Much of this expansion was funded by Facebook funny money in the form of a soaring stock price. It acquired seventy companies in fifteen years. The acquisitions of the nascent Instagram photo-sharing app in April 2012 and the WhatsApp messaging app in February 2014 let Facebook gobble up its two biggest competitive threats at the time.
The deal for Instagram looked crazy and turned out to be one of the biggest high-tech payoffs of all time. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, had spied the photo-sharing app when it was a thirteen-person start-up with zero revenue and 30 million customers. He paid $1 billion in stock and cash for Instagram in April 2012, a month before Facebook went public.
In the next eight years, Facebook’s stock price rose fivefold to $215 a share, and its market cap grew past $600 billion. Instagram’s user base rose thirty-three-fold in the same period. Similarly, Facebook paid $16 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, and the number of its users has more than tripled to 1.5 billion in the years since.
The duopoly of Google and Facebook in online and mobile advertising is staggering in wealth and scale. Google controls almost 80 percent of worldwide ad spending for online search. Facebook holds a similar share of the worldwide market for ads on social media. The two collect more ad revenue, combined, than all spending on all television advertising worldwide: $230 billion projected for 2020, compared with $190 billion for television.
In the United States, the pair controls 60 percent of online ad sales and Amazon has 10 percent, leaving only 30 percent of the market to be divvied up among hundreds or thousands of other advertising companies.
This gives the two titans a grip on the future of advertising, which funds the future of content and media. Traditional advertising was forecast to grow by only 1.5 percent to approach $325 billion in 2020, while the online market was set to grow much faster to reach an even bigger number: up by 13 percent to $335.4 billion, according to the market researcher WARC.
Twitter has 330 million active users worldwide and more than 80 million in the United States. Netflix has 180 million customers worldwide. Amazon has 112 million subscribers to its Prime Video service. Apple has almost three-quarters of a billion iPhone customers and an app store where they can sample from among 2.2 million apps.
Google and Facebook, in particular, are fiendishly vigilant in thwarting, crippling, or acquiring any possible competitive threats hatched among the venture capital seedlings planted in Silicon Valley. For all their dominant market power and the vast lead they have over rivals, they live in paranoid fear that someone is gaining on them, an endemic Valley trait that predates the liberal contagion that has consumed the place.
Their predecessors atop high-tech made software and hardware that wears out in ever-faster product cycles. This provides openings for innovation and faster-better-cheaper newcomers. In social media, the opportunities are fewer. There have been no real product upgrade cycles and technological leaps in the way people talk to one another online. Once more than 2 billion people around the world are on Facebook, the social site has reached escape velocity—there is almost no way for any other service to supplant it.
Thus, venture capital investors want to place their tech bets elsewhere. It leads entrepreneurs and product creators to focus elsewhere, often on making new tools and apps that leverage off the Facebook and Google platforms. The giants have become ecosystems, making the rest of tech more dependent on their beneficence rather than intent on toppling them.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter really don’t offer a product that rivals can outmatch. They are entire worlds unto themselves, all-encompassing online environments where all the commerce, life, and exchanges that occur can do so only because these platform overlords have enabled it—and because they allow them to continue.
Google is a paragon of the monopolistic market bully that government is usually eager to bust up. It has been accused of crushing competitors or stealing from them when it is unable to out-innovate them or acquire them. Its self-identifying posture as a left-leaning beacon of Silicon Valley is, in part, a matter of smart business.
Its workforce of young millennials demands it. Its embrace of the Obama administration spared Google any serious antitrust scrutiny in the United States for eight years. Obama owed much to Google for his electoral success. His administration let Google do whatever it wanted to do. Meanwhile, regulators in Europe slapped the company with record-setting fines exceeding $8 billion for abuses in wringing every last drop of data out of its users.
In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing antitrust charges against Google for abusive tactics that “resulted—and will result—in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.” The staff recommendation resulted from an investigation over the previous twenty-one months.
Google lobbyists increased their visits to the White House in that period, as the Journal later reported. A year later, President Obama’s appointees to the FTC voted unanimously to overrule the staff recommendation and forgo filing any charges.
Despite its massive scale, Google continues to scrap like a barroom brawler. Restaurant review site Yelp has accused Google of scraping Yelp listings and absorbing them into Google’s search results in an attempt to divert consumers from visiting Yelp directly. In targeting travel websites, Google pulled the same tricks, and later it moved into online job searches.
In other cases, it has been accused of stealing technology. The smart-speaker company Sonos, saying that Google had pilfered its technology, filed a patent infringement lawsuit over it. Oracle has won a lawsuit claiming that Google stole its Java language and used it in the operating software for Google’s Android phones made by companies around the world. Google’s appeal of that case was bound for the Supreme Court in 2020.
A lot of competitors are too small to fight back effectively, but never too small to get shut out of the market by the big guys. This is shown by the story of Gab, a new social media site that billed itself as a free-speech alternative to Twitter. It offered features Twitter lacked, such as the ability to edit posts after hitting “Send.” Gab began picking up traction and then got crushed by the New Oligarchs. Google said it bans any apps that could be used by hate groups. Someone must have forgotten to tell it that Twitter hosts accounts for the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Here were some of the hurdles thrown up in front of Gab: Google and Apple refused to add its app to their app stores. Credit card processing companies shut down Gab’s ability to accept payments via card for memberships, donations, and merchandise. Its accounts with email services were terminated, stopping it from sending emails to members. Its domain name account was terminated, so that typing “Gab.com” into a web browser would return an error instead of directing users to the site.
Every possible roadblock was placed in front of the tiny start-up. When the free-market crowd says, “Just make your own site,” it ignores the fact that Apple and Google can block any new rival from access to the entire smartphone world. Gab survived those challenges but had to devote resources to reinventing its underlying software code instead of growing and marketing its business. Many other rivals have gone out of business.
Such anticompetitive behaviors should be a prime target for our antitrust laws. In 1984, the federal government forced the breakup of the old AT&T telephone monopoly. Phone prices were exorbitantly high, innovation was stymied, and competition was blunted by AT&T’s heavy-handed tactics. Windfall benefits redounded for the next thirty years. On the very same day in 1984, it stopped short of breaking up IBM. Later, IBM was humbled and stripped of any predatory power over customers by frenetic competition and innovation rather than government intervention.
In the 1990s, in the case of United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation, which had been fomented by jealous rivals, the government won a key round that, now that we read about it, reveals the entire case for how spurious it was. A federal district judge ordered Microsoft to stop bundling its Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating system for PCs, so outfits such as Netscape would have a fair chance to compete. The government lost on appeal, the two parties settled, and Microsoft would go on to lose its unbridled monopolistic power to Google and the reborn Apple.
In the case of the New Oligarchs in the 2020s, the picture is more disturbing for its implications, antitrust and societal. Their dominance may last for decades into the Trump Century. The ideologies, messages, and voices they promote most on their platforms will thrive; those they ban could fade.
In 2019, investigating big tech came into vogue in a uniquely bipartisan way. In July, Congress held antitrust hearings in Washington and summoned executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, all of which were under Justice Department review.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for mishandling users’ personal data, the largest fine the agency had ever assessed. Google agreed to pay $170 million in federal fines related to YouTube and child privacy.
On Friday, September 6, the attorneys general of eight states, led by New York and including four Democrats and four Republicans, put out a statement announcing a joint antitrust investigation of Facebook. The following Monday, several state AGs held a press conference in Washington to say that forty-eight states were launching an antitrust probe of Google. The two states declining to join the effort were California, the home base of Google and Facebook, and Alabama.
The new investigations were going deeper than the main issue of whether Facebook and Google are too big and too brutal in the online advertising market. The AGs were probing the two companies’ handling of consumer data and their role as the gatekeeper of a lot of internet activity and online competition.
Antitrust investigations proceed only slowly over months or years. A more urgent pushback was necessary to curb the overly liberal bias of the online platforms. Conservative voices were the ones being muted by Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Better-known right-leaning figures might be more outraged—but some of them were on the Silicon Valley payroll.
One example is the National Review. Its editor in chief, Rich Lowry, came out in defense of the New Oligarchs in early 2019, publishing an op-ed on the liberal Politico website beneath the plaintive headline “Don’t Break Up Big Tech.” It was coming under fire from both the Left and the Right. Senator Elizabeth Warren, outraged that Facebook had rejected her ads criticizing Facebook on Facebook, called for the breakup. It was a strange reaction: Would she expect CNN or Fox News to be required to run commercials criticizing them on their own air?
Nonetheless, when Senator Warren tweeted with the umbrage she brings to most issues, the superlib was joined by a surprise ally: archconservative senator Ted Cruz. That prompted the National Review’s Lowry to write on Politico on March 13, 2019, “Tech is caught in a right-left pincer, made all the more powerful by the populist spirit afoot in both parties.” He continued, “Conservatives don’t like these companies because they are owned and operated by sanctimonious Silicon Valley liberals subject to the worst sort of groupthink. Progressives don’t like them because they are colossal profit-making enterprises.” True in both cases.
Lowry even praised the oligarchs of Silicon Valley as “the most successful and iconic American companies.” There was just one thing Lowry forgot to mention: that Google funds the National Review Institute, which owns the National Review. So the Google-funded organization says we must leave Google alone. Now it makes sense.
Google funds various conservative think tanks in the same way any corporation funds most any cause, as a way to buy influence, access, and good PR. In fact, audio of a Google internal meeting leaked to Breitbart News shows senior execs all but laying this out during a meeting with the staff. It was an attempt to quell sensitive, triggered Googlers horrified by its support of anything rightward.
Many employees were upset that Google was a sponsor at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a huge annual gathering in the Washington, DC, area. In late February 2018, Google sponsored what the New York Times later reported to be “a lavish hospitality suite, courting conservatives with an outdoor fireplace, hors d’oeuvres and flowing cocktails. Bright young representatives from Facebook hosted a ‘help desk,’ handing out cookies frosted with emoji icons.”
That sparked an outcry among the hothouse flowers at Google’s base in Mountain View. Senior management hosted an all-hands meeting to soothe the troops, and it was recorded—and leaked a full year later. In the session with employees, Google’s senior director, U.S. public policy, Adam Kovacevich, admitted that CPAC was a “sideshow circus” and an important opportunity to “steer” the conservative movement. Read his words carefully:
The majority of Googlers would want to steer conservatives and Republicans more toward a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more sort of nationalistic, incendiary comments, nativist comments and things like that. But it has been a very valuable place for us to reach a lot of the people and the big tent of conservatism.
Google’s proper role, we thought, was to serve up listings of online information based on simple queries we type into its iconic search box. The thought that senior executives at the company arrogantly view their role as “steering” us anywhere is alarming—and 82 percent of the people on the internet worldwide use Google.
At the CPAC gathering a year later, from February 27 to March 2, 2019, Google and the other companies were no longer quite as welcome. As the New York Times reported on March 4:
At last week’s gathering here in a suburb of Washington, Silicon Valley’s only obvious presence was on the lips of exercised right-wing critics who whipped up the crowd by denouncing the American tech industry as an authoritarian hegemony intent on censoring their cause.
“Facebook, Google, and Twitter are pushing a left-wing social agenda while marshaling their marketing power to shut conservative voices out of the marketplace,” said Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, during a featured session with the ominous title “Blocked: This Panel Has Been Removed for Conservative Content.”
Three days after that story ran, Breitbart broke the news on the leaked tape of the Google protest meeting sparked by the CPAC sponsorship a year earlier. It proved beyond all doubt that the conservatives had made the right call.
Another outfit against breaking up big tech is the Heritage Foundation, whose spokesman Robert Bluey has gone on record as decrying the “heavy-handed government regulation” of the internet giants. Unmentioned is the fact that the Heritage Foundation takes Google money.
Senator Hawley has harshly criticized the Heritage Foundation, along with other supposedly libertarian groups, for being apologists for big tech. The revelation of Google’s link to the Heritage Foundation sparked an outcry from the staff so fierce that the company scuttled plans for a new AI panel whose members were to include the group’s president.
So far, competitors have been unable to rein in GooFaTwit. The same goes for politicians, regulators, and the mainstream media. Who will fight them? Most times in the United States, this kind of gap lures the trial lawyers, who can find a multitude of inventive ways to attack a target and exploit its vulnerabilities.
This tack is all but impossible in the case of the social media triopoly. Under federal law, internet service providers and web hosts are classified as the equivalent of telephone carriers. The old AT&T and the “Baby Bell” local phone spin-offs weren’t to blame for the things said in phone calls on their networks and therefore they couldn’t be sued for libel as a newspaper, magazine, or TV news channel could.
Nor could online providers, such as Comcast in cable, the local telephone companies, and the old America Online in internet access, be held liable. The rise of Facebook, YouTube, and others came a decade later, and they assumed the same setup.
This extra level of protection, higher than even the First Amendment provides to the media and the American people, was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Congress had passed it when the World Wide Web was just getting started, and unbridled expansion was prized. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The original aim of the CDA was to curb minors’ access to pornography, which now accounts for 30 percent of all traffic on the net. It protected internet providers from getting sued for blocking obscene materials from reaching their audiences. It also ensured online carriers’ freedom from legal liability and lawsuits on everything beyond porn.
That now undeserved protection lies in Section 230 of the CDA: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Internet platforms were free of any liability for the words and posts of others on their platforms.
At the time, Section 230 made sense. The New York Times exercises total control over the words it prints on the news and opinion pages. If someone libels me there and the paper relays it to a million readers, both the author and the newspaper deserve to be sued. I would stop short of also suing Facebook when the Times posts the story there: that, too, was the paper’s call. Facebook has less control over what 2 billion people say on its platform.
Section 230 was written into the CDA with a noble purpose: to promote free speech on the internet and protect political speech from censorship. Today, the law has been twisted. Now it protects Google, Facebook, and Twitter from any liability or responsibility, even though they are expanding their roles as censors and curators of the correct political views. This is in direct violation of the intent of the law.
The new law was supposed to protect neutral platforms, but Facebook, Google, and the other behemoths of Silicon Valley openly admitted that they were, instead, publishers making editorial decisions. Why, then, did they get the protection afforded to neutral platforms? Section 230 is now used as a shield for the oligarchs as they remove speech they dislike (usually conservative speech) without fear of legal repercussions.
It is a recipe for impunity. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have total authority and power over their platforms—without also bearing legal liability for their own actions or for what ensues there and without having to pay the cost of maintaining and upgrading the internet infrastructure that delivers their products to more than 2 billion people. The New Oligarchs are free to do as they like, and they and their employees wallow in too much Trump hate to be trusted.
In June 2019, Senator Josh Hawley filed a bill in the Senate to strip the oligarchs of Section 230 protection if outside inspections unearthed evidence of bias and underhanded tactics. He had started pursuing big tech when he was state attorney general in Missouri. His new Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act would impose bias audits on internet giants and inspect their algorithms and content moderation policies. For companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have been caught red-handed at this so many times, even proposing such a law may make them think twice about blacklisting the next conservative voice.
Six months later, Attorney General William Barr escalated the attack on the New Oligarchs and their abuses of Section 230. It came in an address he made on December 10, 2019, to the National Association of Attorneys General at a gathering in Washington, DC. At the time, forty-eight state AGs, plus those of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, were already jointly investigating Google for antitrust violations. Barr told his colleagues:
Section 230 has been interpreted quite broadly by the courts. Today, many are concerned that Section 230 immunity has been extended far beyond what Congress originally intended. Ironically, Section 230 has enabled platforms to absolve themselves completely of responsibility for policing their platforms, while blocking or removing third-party speech—including political speech—selectively, and with impunity.
Barr went on to describe for his state counterparts the various ways antitrust law could be applied to the social media platforms and the status of the Justice Department’s ongoing antitrust review of Google’s many bullying behaviors.
Big tech is also a complicit and willing ally of our biggest enemy and rival, China. Their social justice warrior workers decry President Trump, yet the tech giants bow and scrape to Chinese leaders in an effort to appease them and do more business with the country. Silicon Valley is happy to work with the brutal Communist Chinese government, even as its employees protest working with the US government.
Though Facebook and Google remove tweets from presidential advisors and Fox anchors, they blithely allow, without question, Chinese government ministers to propagate propaganda to millions of Americans. China asserted on Twitter that US military troops brought the Wuhan virus to Wuhan, and Twitter let that ridiculous accusation stand unchallenged. Google was developing a censored search engine for China called Dragonfly until it was shut down in July 2019. It was even building technology into the search engine to help China track dissidents. Don’t be evil.
If you have teenage children or grandchildren, they may be on the social media app TikTok, where youngsters upload short video clips of themselves dancing and singing. That app is owned by China, and only it knows what level of information about your loved ones and their devices is being collected. The Communist Chinese are the only rivals of Silicon Valley in lacking any compunction about gathering up every detail of your life from apps and devices, whether for profit or for some nefarious purpose.
China’s influence on Americans’ internet and entertainment habits is spreading. Fortnite is the most popular video game in America for teens and younger children, and it has a quarter-billion users around the world. It is owned by Tencent, a giant Chinese gaming company. Epic, the US company that hosts Fortnite, claims it shares nothing with the Chinese company.
Then again, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley have testified to Congress that their platforms demonstrate no bias against conservatives.
Working with China seems an intolerable hypocrisy for the oligarchs. Apple deigns to dictate whether Americans can view particular ultraconservative opinions on their iPhones, which were made in Chinese plants where some workers have attempted suicide by jumping out of a nearby window because their working conditions were so mindless and bleak. The factories have erected nets to stop them from succeeding.
The next big battle with China will break out in the competition for world domination of the next-generation wireless design known as 5G, for “fifth generation.” Right now, the network speed for smartphones is 4G, but we are rapidly approaching 5G networks, and we are lagging behind China. A big part of the problem has been Silicon Valley’s reliance on the Chinese company Huawei for hardware. China experts argue that Huawei is the de facto technology arm of the Chinese surveillance state.
According to the China critic Gordon G. Chang, the United States must block Huawei technology from infiltrating US wireless networks. The gear would let China scoop up the world’s data, eavesdrop on any communications it wanted to monitor, and control billions of devices that will be linked to the Internet of Things.
In February 2020, retired air force brigadier general Robert Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, warned that the Chinese government uses US companies to push its point of view on the US government. He said that US companies such as Qualcomm “come to the Department of Defense, seeming like an ally, when in reality they’re working as a proxy for the Chinese Communist Party, because that’s how China and the Chinese Communist Party has incentivized the system.”
Also in February 2020, conservative groups including FreedomWorks, R Street, and the Lincoln Network sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on the urgency of the 5G rollout:
Enabling rapid, widespread deployment of 5G wireless in urban and rural areas is critical to maintain America’s economic well-being, national defense, and global competitiveness. We do not underestimate the stakes; China continues to advance on 5G and could surpass the U.S. in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, quantum computing, and robotics. The C-band is where 5G innovation in these technologies will happen, and if the U.S. does not provision this spectrum as quickly as possible in 2020, it will lose the opportunity to compete with China—a potentially devastating but avoidable outcome.
The issue of 5G is of global importance and vital to US interests—and we must make sure we can trust Silicon Valley to abide by the Trump doctrine of America First. So far, big tech has failed on this point.
There is no one solution to reverse the course of Silicon Valley and return it to its free speech roots—especially if the Democrats won the 2020 presidential election and the government was overtaken by the Valley’s ideological doppelgangers. If President Trump won reelection, we would have a chance to reclaim free expression and meritocracy in the hallways of US high-tech companies.
Democrats embrace the censorship of Silicon Valley, and any Democratic administration would witness a return to the Obama years, with a revolving door of tech employees in DC, an internet policy dictated by the progressive lunatics at Google and Facebook, and a red carpet rolled out for Communist China’s Huawei.
There are ways to push the New Oligarchs back to the center and true neutrality. An attack on Silicon Valley on many fronts would undercut its business model of exploiting private data and flaunting legal protections. When profits fall, even the most progressive oligarch will begin listening to customers again.
In a second term, President Trump might make significant inroads in advancing on this front. A model for how he might proceed may lie in another great victory he racked up in his first term, this one in June 2018: the repeal of net neutrality.
It was seen as the crown jewel of Obama’s internet policy, and it had Google’s fingerprints all over it. The Democratic majority on the Federal Communications Commission passed a new regulation restricting Comcast and other big carriers from blocking content from other giants, including Netflix and Google’s subsidiary YouTube—something they had never done, to begin with. That was an issue that Google had helped create; no real problem existed.
The rule, approved by the FCC on February 26, 2010, forced Google’s carriers—internet service providers (ISPs)—to treat all internet traffic as equal. It banned them from demanding special deals even of companies whose streaming video chokes their bandwidth, Netflix and YouTube in particular; the two services hog upward of 20 percent of all internet bandwidth in the United States. Silicon Valley loved net neutrality because it restricted carriers, which had the burden of maintaining their networks while protecting content suppliers like themselves.
The Obama administration sold net neutrality to the world with scare tactics, saying that ISPs could censor you at any time and silence your voice on the internet. Sound familiar? It is what Silicon Valley does to conservatives daily.
Donald Trump installed a champion at the FCC in the form of Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai immediately moved to repeal net neutrality. On November 28, 2017, he proposed repealing the regulation and released a 3,000-word statement to his fellow FCC members, urging them to vote with him on the issue. He pointed out that although the regulation had been aimed at controlling the behavior of ISPs, it was “edge providers” such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter that were censoring people and their view. He wrote:
[Edge] providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.
The examples from the past year alone are legion. App stores barring the doors to apps from even cigar aficionados because they are perceived to promote tobacco use. Streaming services restricting videos from the likes of conservative commentator Dennis Prager on subjects he considers “important to understanding American values.” Algorithms that decide what content you see (or don’t), but aren’t disclosed themselves. Online platforms secretly editing certain users’ comments. And of course, American companies caving to repressive foreign governments’ demands to block certain speech—conduct that would be repugnant to free expression if it occurred within our borders.
In this way, edge providers are a much bigger actual threat to an open Internet than broadband providers, especially when it comes to discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.
It was a scathing summary, and every word of it was true. In his conclusion, he anticipated the virulent overreaction his words would trigger among the sensitive radical lefties in Silicon Valley: “So when you get past the wild accusations, fearmongering, and hysteria, here’s the boring bottom line: the plan to restore Internet freedom would return us to the light touch, market-based approach under which the Internet thrived. And that’s why I’m asking my colleagues to vote for it on December 14.”
Pai’s blunt broadside sent everyone else into a tizzy in Silicon Valley, the leftist mainstream media, and among the Dems. It was the end of the internet, they declared. Free speech would die, and the internet would slow to a crawl. That last part was the universal refrain: internet speeds would slow dramatically as costs ballooned because the ISPs would feel they could get away with it.
President Trump and his new Republican FCC chairman got their way, and the FCC repealed net neutrality on June 11, 2018. The internet kept working fine—in fact, it got faster than ever. The repeal let the ISPs know that they had the power to avoid being forced into bad deals and that they could recover more of their cost of expanding the infrastructure of the internet by billing bandwidth hogs more than normal users.
The internet has sped up dramatically since the repeal of net neutrality. According to Ookla, which tests internet speeds, broadband speeds in the United States improved by 36 percent in the first year after the repeal. They have likely gone up since then. Without burdensome net neutrality rules, the free market is working, something that should thrill conservative think tanks, even if they remain in Google’s pocket.
It’s truly Trumpian and a promising step toward returning Silicon Valley to its rightful place as a center of innovation, job creation, and free speech for all. Only Donald Trump was capable of winning that fight, and only if Americans gave him that opportunity.