We’ve seen this play before.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants Congress to regulate him, and he’ll say as much Thursday when he testifies before a House subcommittee. This will undoubtedly surprise some lawmakers and many reporters who cling to the facile assumption that Big Business and Big Government are always and forever enemies.
But it’s one of the oldest plays in Big Business’s Washington playbook: Lobby for costly regulation that will drive out smaller competitors and keep out future competitors — and along the way, earn plaudits as a responsible capitalist.
We remember when Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, helped write former President Barack Obama’s bill regulating cigarettes, also known as the Marlboro Monopoly Act. We remember when H&R Block’s CEO joined the Obama administration to write (unlawful) regulations on tax preparers, which were welcomed by the big guys.
We’ve read our history, and so we know that the big airlines loved airline regulation because it protected them from competition.
H.J. Heinz, when he developed ketchup that didn’t require sodium benzoate as a preservative, tried to outlaw sodium benzoate as a preservative.
Zuckerberg is apparently a student of this history. Perhaps he should have just cribbed his testimony from that of Thomas E. Wilson more than a century ago. Speaking for the big meatpackers whom Upton Sinclair had skewered and whom Teddy Roosevelt sought to protect, Wilson said, “We are now and have always been in favor of” strict federal regulation of meatpacking plants.
Zuckerberg, then, joins a long and distinguished line of industrialists calling for more regulation. And we have to assume Zuckerberg understands that regulation is protection.
Every member of Congress should remember that on Thursday, when Zuckerberg testifies, “we also support updated Internet regulation to set the rules of the road.”
Zuckerberg, according to his testimony, will call for a federal regulation that Facebook and other media platforms “be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it.” Those systems, and proving them to Uncle Sam, will be costly, but we’re quite confident Facebook can afford those costs.
Such consolidation-by-regulation is especially pernicious in this industry in these times. As Democratic politicians, left-wing activists, and their media allies get more and more censorious, the last thing we need is a government-protected oligopoly limiting what can and cannot be said.
When conservatives would grumble at Facebook or Twitter deplatforming one of their own, or falsely flagging as “disinformation” something that upset abortion activists or gender ideologues, one mainstream-left response was, Facebook and Twitter can do what they want. Don’t like their rules, start your own social network.
So Parler did exactly that. Then, under pressure from Democratic politicians, Amazon deplatformed Parler.
Now, Zuckerberg wants rules that will act as a regulatory moat around his own network. That would mean even less of a threat of competition. This wouldn’t merely free Facebook to ignore user demand, it would even further empower government to call Facebook’s shots on what viewpoints and facts are allowed in the public discourse.
No, thank you.
We understand why Facebook’s CEO would want Congress to build barriers to entry that would protect him. That doesn’t mean we think it’s fair play — a CEO should win by offering a better product rather than by outlawing competing products. And congressmen, who surely have seen their share of regulatory robbery, ought to say no.
