I had forgotten all about Sir Nick Clegg. In 2015, Britain’s deputy prime minister led his Liberal Democrats to a spectacular electoral wipeout, going from 57 members of Parliament to eight. Two years later, he lost his own Sheffield constituency and disappeared — or so we thought — from public life.
But he was back last week as the vice president of Facebook, explaining why the company had “removed a number of ads from Donald Trump.”
I am all in favor of people doing well for themselves, and who can blame Cleggie, once my colleague in the European Parliament, for swapping the gray skies of Sheffield for a $9 million mansion in Silicon Valley? Still, it is worth asking why Facebook and other tech giants are prepared to offer multimillion-dollar salaries to ex-pols as part of their colossal lobbying efforts.
The answer, of course, is that Big Tech is now very much in the politics business. Last week, for example, it emerged that Google had threatened to demonetize the Federalist, a tiny, online conservative magazine, because NBC had objected to some of the remarks posted in its comment section. (Hilariously, Google insists that it cannot be held liable for its own content since it does not curate it, but it is unwilling to apply the same logic to the Federalist’s comments section.)
Ten years ago, perhaps even five years ago, a news item like that would have been shocking. Now, it is just the latest in a series of political stories involving social media companies and other online behemoths. The days when Google was a laid-back, laissez-faire, “don’t be evil” outfit are long gone. Facebook and YouTube, similarly, have started weeding out content they dislike on political grounds — including, for example, content criticizing the coronavirus lockdowns.
You can’t entirely blame Google, Facebook, or YouTube. As they grew larger, politicians started wanting to tax and regulate them. It is an act of self-defense to hire lobbyists — including politicians who, like Clegg, brought their contacts with current rule-setters.
Once it starts, though, corporatism almost always turns into a racket. I remember from my days in the European Parliament how active these companies were in Brussels, where a combination of control-freakery and anti-Americanism had created a hostile regulatory environment. Almost every U.S. tech colossus had at one time or another found itself on the receiving end of hostile regulations from the European Union, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
They did not respond, as you might have expected, by lobbying against all such regulations. On the contrary, they would sometimes push for more stringent rules, knowing that they would find it easier than their smaller rivals to meet the compliance costs. An initially adversarial relationship between governments and big business thus became symbiotic, as both worked to keep out new competitors. That, in a nutshell, is what we mean by crony capitalism.
It works both ways. Politicians can use laws to reward or threaten particular corporations. But some of these corporations are now powerful enough to level equivalent threats against politicians.
Consider, as a hypothetical illustration, the following scenario. Google knows a great deal about you. Your search history, even if you are uninterested in politics, will indicate, with perhaps an 80% accuracy rate, how likely you are to vote in November and for whom. You don’t need to have looked at any political websites. A good algorithm will be able to infer your opinions from apparently unrelated traits, such as what you order from Amazon, where you book your vacations, and whether you own a pet.
Suppose that on Election Day, Google changed its doodle, the image on its homepage, to “GO VOTE.” But suppose that it did so only for the 2 million voters whom it knew to be likely to vote for a particular party and to be most in need of a prompt.
No wonder politicians handle it gently.
Whose fault is all this? I’m afraid it’s yours. You allowed the Big Tech companies to get their hands on your data in the first place. You say you don’t like it, but in practice, you don’t really care.
How do I know you don’t care? Well, if you’re reading these words online, there is a good chance that you have recently been asked to click “I agree” in order to access something or other. Did you read the blurb, or did you just scroll straight down and click? I thought so.
If you resent the tie-up between Big Tech and big government, I sympathize. Cartels are never good news. But it is you — we, all of us — who enabled this cartel in the first place.
