On Tuesday, executives from several major tech companies testified on Capitol Hill in three separate hearings about a variety of issues, ranging from the supposed lack of competition in the tech industry to the alleged censorship of conservative speech online. The hearings didn’t go too well, with several congressmen continuing to turn up the heat and blasting the executives, likely in preparation for their regulatory proposals.
They should not be so hasty. Most tech companies such as Facebook and Google are by no means monopolies, and calls of censorship are often made by actors looking to boost their public profiles, and sometimes their wallets, too. For the sake of consumers everywhere, the government should stay as far away from the internet as possible.
The prevalence of competition in the tech industry was a constant theme throughout this week’s hearings, with several key witnesses refuting the narrative that the major social media platforms are monopolies. To give one example, Facebook Director of Public Policy Matt Perault cited a laundry list of other products that have overlapping, competing functions:
It’s inherently difficult to give a perfect apples-to-apples comparison between any two tech platforms. There is no competitor to Facebook that performs all the exact same functions as Facebook, for example. If one did exist, it wouldn’t exactly have a compelling business plan since it would just be a carbon copy of a better known, more established platform. Big Tech is not like the major industries of yesteryear, where the government could simply break up a big company like AT&T or Standard Oil into several smaller ones performing the same functions as one another.
And while it may seem like today’s tech companies will last forever, the lesson of history is clear: AOL, Netscape, LiveJournal, Myspace, and so many other tech companies of the past seemed unbeatable at their heights, only to be taken down by new competitors.
So rather than promoting competition, potential government action would likely have the opposite effect, enshrining tech giants’ position of power, as regulatory red tape hurts new startups the most. As Perault correctly observed, there is still plenty of competition among tech firms; it’s just not the same type of competition as in years past.
As for complaints of censorship, the evidence simply does not pan out. A study from the Economist, for example, found no evidence of ideological bias in Google’s search results. Nevertheless, there is a clear motive for conservative pundits to claim such bias: money and fame.
Conservative commentator Dennis Prager, for instance, testified during Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about Big Tech’s alleged bias. His complaints center around YouTube’s decision to not air approximately 20% of his PragerU videos for users in restricted viewing mode.
Considering that the channel deals with sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust, it’s hard to see why, for instance, computer users at elementary schools, churches, public libraries, and the like should be allowed to stumble upon his often controversial videos. Indeed, this seems to fly in the face of the very conservative values of individual autonomy, family values, and community decision-making that conservatives like Prager value. Indeed, it’s hard to take cries of “censorship” too seriously from a man whose YouTube channel still receives millions of views on almost every video.
But, of course, there’s a clear reason why Prager would cry wolf: There’s currency in victimhood. Complaining conservatives have only boosted their profiles (and thus their profits) by crying censorship and are sometimes ironically making the same calls to break up Big Tech as their political foes such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts.
Congress should know better than to give into their game. The tech industry is by no means perfect and should absolutely face intense scrutiny from consumers. However, getting government involved with the internet will have disastrous consequences — and won’t make the net a more competitive, fairer place anyway.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
