The Overlooked Conservative Case for Reining in Big Tech
By: Will Oremus
Tags: Pattern Matching, Antitrust, Facebook, Technology, Apple

The Overlooked Conservative Case for Reining in Big Tech

Democrats aren’t the only ones ready to rewrite the antitrust rules for internet platforms

Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images

Never in world history has one sector of the global economy risen to such global dominance, so fast, as Big Tech has in the past 20 years.

In 2000, Amazon was an online bookseller, Apple was still an underdog, Google was a scrappy startup with little revenue, and Facebook didn’t exist. Today, along with Microsoft, they are the world’s five most valuable companies, and their decisions carry a level of global influence rivaled only by nation-states. They exert control over what we can say, how we can say it, what we buy, and what we read, and they wield unilateral power over the countless smaller businesses that rely on their platforms.

Until about five years ago, a prevailing 21st-century view was that the internet sector was so dynamic that upstarts could come along at any point and depose the giants: Just look at how Google and Apple blew past Microsoft, or how Facebook conquered MySpace. That view is no longer tenable, as the top platforms’ network effects, lock-in, access to data, diversification of business lines, and ability to buy or copy rivals has given them advantages that now appear nearly insurmountable. The relevant business question is no longer, “Will they stay on top?”, but rather, “What markets will they conquer next?” (The one competitive threat that still looms is that China-based giants could outmaneuver them with products such as WeChat and TikTok. But the Trump administration’s crackdown on Chinese tech has abruptly curtailed that threat domestically, and India’s crackdown has mitigated it in the largest non-aligned market.)

What to do about that concentration of power, if anything, is a question that has rapidly grown in urgency. There is an emerging consensus that antitrust action in some form is warranted, including among Republicans who are naturally skeptical of government intervention in markets. But there has been little clarity or agreement as to what form that action should take — until now.

The Pattern

We finally have a blueprint for regulating Big Tech. Or rather, two blueprints.

Undercurrents

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time.

Facebook and Twitter are taking some precautionary measures ahead of the U.S. election. The most interesting came from Twitter, which announced on Friday that it will take three previously untried steps to pump the brakes on misinformation and polarizing content, starting October 20. First, it will default to a quote-tweet when you go to retweet something, encouraging you to stop and think about what you want to add to the conversation rather than simply amplifying a viewpoint. Second, it will stop surfacing tweets from people you don’t follow in your feed or notifications. Finally, it will only show trending topics that come with editorial context. You can read its full announcement here. Facebook, for its part, announced an indefinite ban on political ads starting after November 3, along with other measures aimed at thwarting misinformation around who won the election or incitements to violence in its wake.

The most interesting came from Twitter, which announced on Friday that it will take three previously untried steps to pump the brakes on misinformation and polarizing content, starting October 20. First, it will default to a quote-tweet when you go to retweet something, encouraging you to stop and think about what you want to add to the conversation rather than simply amplifying a viewpoint. Second, it will stop surfacing tweets from people you don’t follow in your feed or notifications. Finally, it will only show trending topics that come with editorial context. You can read its full announcement here. Facebook, for its part, announced an indefinite ban on political ads starting after November 3, along with other measures aimed at thwarting misinformation around who won the election or incitements to violence in its wake. Cambridge Analytica didn’t unduly influence Brexit, a U.K. commission concluded, wrapping a three-year investigation into the political consultancy’s use of Facebook data in the campaign. The Financial Times reports that probe found that the methods used by a Cambridge Analytica affiliate were “in the main, well recognised processes using commonly available technology,” and that the resulting targeting of voters was not uniquely effective. The report was taken as vindication by some who felt the Cambridge Analytica scandal was overblown all along. Some privacy advocates were quick to reply that the real scandal was always more about how the data was gathered and obtained than how it affected election outcomes. (Both can be true; I made a version of this argument in 2018.)

Headlines of the week

Five Years of Tech Diversity Reports — and Little Progress

— Sara Harrison, Wired

How Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England

— Alex Hern, The Guardian

QAnon high priest was just trolling away as a Citigroup tech executive

— William Turton and Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg