Pop quiz: You disagree with a private company’s decision, so you demand more regulation as revenge against that company. What cable news channel are you featured on?
Most of the time, the safe guess is CNN or MSNBC. But if you were watching cable news Monday night, you would actually be wrong.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson fully jumped into the populist policy arena by proposing to harass Google into submission merely because they fired someone, James Damore, unfairly (as Tucker sees it). Tucker’s rant, included a pithy “Those are Super Villain Slogans” section in reference to Google’s mottos before taking a dark turn and calling for Congress to go further than Europe in their treatment of Google.
Tucker closed his rant by calling for the regulation of Google as a public utility.
In other words, Tucker wants a lot of Tucker-like bureaucrats to sit around and figure out what search results should pop up when he types “Who is the fairest of them all?” into Google. If it pops up with anything besides “Tucker Carlson,” then he would likely object – and would want the company regulated even more.
Like Tucker, I don’t agree with the firing of James Damore. He was the Google engineer who recently rose to fame (or infamy) because of a viral memo he wrote discussing diversity – which you may or may not agree with (I don’t). However, unlike Tucker, I don’t think the federal government should step in and regulate a company because loud people disagree with one of their internal decisions.
Let’s look at this from a PR angle. Google didn’t fire this guy because he had a different opinion that he expressed at the water cooler. He publicly released a statement that’s contrary to the company’s image. Are you telling me that someone who worked for Keebler wouldn’t be in trouble if he wrote an op-ed about how much he hates cookies or how bad they are for your health?
Regardless, there could have been much more to the Google’s decision than just the memo: so why should Tucker Carlson or I get to decide Google’s HR policy? We shouldn’t. And the only group that should have less influence than Tucker or I do over Google’s day-to-day HR policy is Congress.
The solution is for Congress to protect a competitive economic climate. Provide more reasons for Bing to improve their algorithm instead of fewer. Give DuckDuckGo founders a reason to double down on their work and try to compete with Google.
More regulation doesn’t encourage competition, more regulation merely keeps up-starts, start-ups, and innovators out of the race. More regulation cuts down on competition instead of building it – it ensures that industry leaders like Google stay on top rather than have to fight to remain king of the hill.
Whether Tucker’s trouble is that he doesn’t agree with Google’s decision in this or any other case, then I encourage him to start or support a competitor instead of whining to the government to protect him from what he personally considers an objectionable decision made between an employer and its employee.
Fortunately, the Trump administration seems to understand the idea that less regulation equals more competition. In fact, one of the most successful projects of the Trump administration has been their efforts to roll back the increased regulation of internet service providers under the Obama administration. Former President Barack Obama’s FCC started regulating ISP’s like public utilities, and Trump’s FCC is well on the way of rolling those regulations back to where they belong, protecting the Internet as a bastion of competition as well as cooperation.
In the meantime, maybe Tucker Carlson should start wearing bow-ties again. He seemed to be less supportive of big government solutions when he was wearing bowties. Maybe we could get Congress to make him wear bow-ties?
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributer to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor and for an academic think tank.
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