The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, came out on Tuesday against a slew of bipartisan bills aimed at reining in Big Tech companies, claiming they won’t solve the problems of anti-conservative bias and censorship on social media platforms.
Jordan, along with Mark Meadows, then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff in 2020, said in an op-ed that five recently announced House antitrust bills would allow the Biden administration to control Big Tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
Jordan and many other House Republicans say that there is unfair censorship of conservatives on social media and that they want to hold Big Tech companies accountable and possibly even break them up.
“But these bills do nothing to fight Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias and censorship,” Jordan and Meadows wrote in an opinion piece.
“If you think Big Tech is bad now, just wait until Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are working in collusion with Big Government,” they added.
BREAKING UP BIG TECH WOULD ADDRESS CONSERVATIVE FEARS OF BIAS, TOP DEMOCRAT SAYS
The antitrust package, “A Stronger Online Economy: Opportunity, Innovation, Choice,” consists of five bipartisan bills drafted by lawmakers on the House Antitrust Subcommittee that would make tech user data portable, restrict acquisitions by Big Tech platforms, block platforms from selling on the marketplaces they control, stop companies from giving preference to their own products and services, and provide more resources for the two antitrust agencies in the federal government.
Each of the bills is co-sponsored by more than one Democrat and Republican, and more members from both sides of the aisle are expected to support the package in the coming weeks, a spokesman for the subcommittee said.
“The Democrats have cleverly tried to recruit Republicans to make their bills seem like a serious and noncontroversial bipartisan effort. But a close look at these bills shows them for what they are: a clear and present danger to freedom,” Jordan and Meadows wrote.
The two Republicans also said that the antitrust bills would hurt a key part of Trump’s presidential legacy.
“Remember how Trump reshaped the federal judiciary with hundreds of new federal judges to be a check on the unaccountable administrative state? These bills would legislate away the power of these new judges by giving unprecedented power and deference to Biden-run regulatory agencies,” they wrote.
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Instead of supporting the bipartisan antitrust bills introduced, Jordan and Meadows want to take away tech companies’ liability protections, which the Section 230 law gives them, and also support breaking up the Big Tech companies altogether.
