If you want to know where the Republican Party is headed on antitrust, you should read Rep. Ken Buck’s (R-CO) new book
Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech
.
Like most Republicans, Buck used to have a more hands-off approach to markets. “The best way to deal with problems in the marketplace is to let the market address the problems,” Buck recounts thinking before an Antitrust Subcommittee hearing in Boulder, Colorado, in 2020.
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But the testimony Buck heard that day changed his mind about the ability of the tech sector to police itself. The subcommittee heard from four witnesses that day, each of whom started small, initially successful companies that were then crushed by a Big Tech behemoth.
Kristen Daru, who started a tracking device company called Tile, recounted how her company was initially wildly successful in Apple’s App store before Apple developed its own in-house competitor, the app Find My.
Not only did Apple use its market power to pre-install iPhones with the Find My app, but it also made it hard for customers of Tile to find the required permissions on their iPhones to enable the Tile devices to work. Meanwhile, the Find My permissions came already turned on. Additionally, Tile users were constantly prompted by reminders from their iPhones to turn the Tile permissions off. No such prompts to turn Find My permissions off were sent.
Apple was rigging the game against Tile.
When Buck asked Daru if she wanted to ban Apple from offering competing products in its app store, Daru declined. “We welcome fair competition,” Daru testified, “but it has to be fair. We’re seeing time and again, Apple using its dominant market power and engaging in practices that put us at a competitive disadvantage … and it’s those types of unfair practices that we need to curb.”
Buck has since co-authored bipartisan legislation with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) that does exactly that. Their Open App Markets Act would prohibit companies that own app platforms with more than 50 million users from forcing developers to use an in-app payment system owned or controlled by the platform. The legislation also forbids companies from using platform-harvested data from third-party apps to build their own competitive apps, and it forbids platforms from preferencing competing apps on their platform.
Buck also voices support for Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) bipartisan Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, which is co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Buck details how Google bought its way to a monopoly in the online advertising market with its purchase of DoubleClick in 2008. Not only does Google use its market power to force companies to buy ads across its platforms (Google Search, YouTube, etc.), but it also owns and operates the marketplace used to buy and sell online advertising.
As one Google employee has described it, the online advertising market currently operates as if Goldman Sachs owned and operated the New York Stock Exchange. Of course Goldman would abuse its market power in that situation.
Lee’s bill would, in Buck’s words, “prevent tech giants that made more than $20 billion in revenue from operating on all three sides of the ad sales equation: selling, buying, and running the high-speed ad auction exchanges.”
Buck also touts his own bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would let small media companies (like the Washington Examiner) band together and negotiate fair advertising deals with platforms such as Google and Facebook. Similar legislation passed in Australia cost Google and Facebook billions while also creating hundreds of jobs for small online content creators.
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Buck spends a good chunk of the book exposing Big Tech’s bias against conservatives and their close ties to the Democratic Party. There is no doubt that the Republican Party’s willingness to take on Big Tech is in no small part due to the progressive social agenda these companies push.
But that cultural animosity is also paired with sound economic analysis of how Big Tech has rigged the market in its favor and how the government should respond. If Biden is looking for some bipartisan wins heading into 2024, helping Republicans take down Big Tech would be a good place to start.
