Steve Bannon, Trump campaign chief and now chief adviser to the President, called for regulations on Google and Facebook, citing them as essential public utilities. Regulations that could be placed on Google and Facebook would be similar to the regulations on phone and cable companies as well as internet service providers.
While the aforementioned regulations that are already imposed on phone, cable, and internet companies were good for making companies compete which caused prices to decrease, the same effect would not be spurred by regulations on Google and Facebook, as Bannon may hope. These services are essential to almost everyone’s daily lives but are not able to be regulated like internet and phone companies because they do not create internet services, they just run off of internet service.
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Others cite a sort of “internet monopoly” held by Google and Facebook. Google, being the most widely used search engine, and Facebook, being the most used social media platform, are indeed huge parts of the internet, but are not monopolies. The existence of other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, and other social media platforms like Twitter and Snapchat have decent market shares.
A more realistic motivation behind Bannon’s call for regulation is because of the way Facebook and Google pick and choose what they show. Facebook prioritizes certain news and Google hids search results. Facebook’s fake news list, for example, was particularly egregious and truly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, but more regulation is not the answer.
Since Google and Facebook run off the internet, they are essentially already governed by internet regulations. Policies that would regulate the internet like net neutrality would automatically affect internet services. If certain things can’t take place on the internet, then by extension, these same rules should already apply to services that operate via the internet.
With the internet being a relatively new creation, it’s tough to apply any constitutional principles to internet services like Google and Facebook. Manipulating search results doesn’t take away anyone’s First Amendment right per se, but is tyrannical in the sense that it alters one’s access to information. In an information based society, applying the First Amendment to prevent censorship or agenda driven policies online is the answer — not legislation or further regulation.
The government has no business in regulating services that run on the internet by classifying them as utilities. These internet services should simply be held to the standard law already in place: following the First Amendment as it legally applies, and obey the laws of net neutrality.
Any individual case where one’s access to information is altered should be handled by the Justice Department and pre-existing laws should be fit to apply.
