One of the questions facing state and federal governments concerned by how Silicon Valley standouts like Facebook and Google protect — and profit from — their users’ data is what kind of leverage prosecutors have against the firms through antitrust laws.
Finding an answer was among the focal points of a meeting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened Tuesday with representatives from the offices of 14 state attorneys general amid growing scrutiny of the companies on Capitol Hill.
The session, occurring amid Republican concern that technology firms are suppressing conservative voices, followed the revelation this spring that one of President Trump’s campaign consultants improperly accessed data on 87 million Facebook users and the later disclosure that Google allows some app developers access to Gmail accounts.
“It really zeroed in on privacy,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra told reporters afterward, while declining to specify the precise nature of the concerns. The prosecutors didn’t reach any conclusions on enforcement or policy, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions will review the points they made and continue the discussions, the Justice Department said.
“There are growing concerns that the sector is moving in spaces that most people couldn’t have thought of or imagined and trying to understand what that means,” Becerra said. “No one has wrapped their arms around this because it has moved faster than any of us.”
Given the size of some of the companies, critics have argued that they have amassed monopolistic market power and should be broken up, much as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was in the early 1900s. Existing laws including the Sherman Antitrust Act give the government the power to do so in certain cases, which might lend weight to any requests for reforms from policymakers.
At the same time, the government has a vested interest in ensuring that any regulation doesn’t hinder the dynamism of one of America’s most vibrant industries.
“We’re always talking about making sure that we don’t take out the goose that laid the golden egg,” Becerra said. “There are very few people in this world today who don’t benefit in some way from the technology that these companies have made available to pretty much everyone.”
In California alone, the tech industry accounts for nearly 15 percent of a $2.7 trillion economy, the fifth-largest in the world.
“It’s one of those things where I think we acknowledge that this is a force to be reckoned with, but it’s a force that we helped create,” Becerra said. “It’s a force that continues to have a dynamism that I don’t think most people would want to dispose of.”
How much of Tuesday’s discussion focused on concerns that social media companies are stifling the free exchange of ideas, which Sessions noted in an early proposal, was unclear. His statement had prompted criticism from libertarian groups of what they viewed as potential interference by the government with the businesses’ First Amendment rights.
Three attorneys general, including Brian Frosh of Maryland, told USA Today that Sessions brought up the issue more than once but state prosecutors generally declined to engage.
“It seemed to me the purpose of the meeting was to push the Trump administration idea that they are going to somehow drive political bias out of social media,” Frosh told the news outlet. “I think that’s stifling political speech and it’s a dangerous business, and I said so.”
While President Trump has claimed Google search results are biased against him, and GOP lawmakers have used Capitol Hill hearings to make similar accusations, Democrats and outside attorneys have pointed out that the First Amendment prohibits only the government from interfering with free speech, not private businesses.
Google has flatly denied the president’s claim, and Facebook and Twitter executives have told Congress that their goal is to provide a platform for everyone, as long as they don’t violate policies against offensive or illegal behavior.
“That’s a very important founding principle of what we do,” founder Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate’s judiciary and commerce committees in April. “As long as I’m running the company, I’m going to be committed to making sure that is the case.”
