The action was taken over allegedly unlawful cooperation between Google and Apple to control the mobile phone sales and advertising markets.
Not only was the particular article blocked from being shared, but the newspaper’s account was shut down by Twitter and limited by Facebook.
Many conservatives have been arguing for the government to break up the high-tech giants because of their liberal biases and control over how people get their information. When I ask them how such a breakup won’t simply spawn many high-tech companies, each with liberal biases, they don’t have an answer.
Winners and Losers
In 1969, the U.S. government brought an antitrust lawsuit against IBM. Do you remember that IBM was once a behemoth tech company, much larger than all other computer companies combined? Six years later, the case went to trial. Seven years after that, the government withdrew its case. IBM made some concessions—I know, because I worked for Silicon Valley company ROLM, which IBM bought in 1984 and immediately sold off the computer division to avoid another potential lawsuit.Netscape relied on advertising and publicity and great positive coverage by the media, not technology. Their product was buggy and unreliable compared to Microsoft’s solid Internet Explorer. I had an e-learning startup at the time, and my web designers would beg me not to have to support Navigator. Netscape collapsed of its own internal mismanagement, not from any bad behavior by Microsoft.
The proof of this is that while Netscape was publicly whining about big, bad Microsoft, Google was quietly creating a new software business that would eventually compete legitimately with Microsoft.
Should the government break up the new tech giants? I don’t think so. IBM was king until Microsoft dethroned it. Then, Apple surpassed Microsoft. Google came out of nowhere to become one of the fastest-growing companies in history. Facebook didn’t exist only 20 years ago. Netscape is gone. Myspace is gone. Yahoo is a minor player.
A Public Square
But what do we do about the fact that Silicon Valley companies have so much control over the information we receive? As I pointed out in another article, these companies have strong “progressive” biases because in Silicon Valley, these biases are the unquestioned norms. That’s why the company executives argue so vehemently that they aren’t biased. Breaking up these companies would only produce smaller, still biased companies.To maintain these protections, tech companies should revert to the original concept of the internet as a public square. I propose that they restrict nothing on their sites that doesn’t violate the laws of the jurisdictions in which it is viewed. Users could then vote on whether an ad or a post is truthful, false, obscene, important, biased, racist, etc. Those things that are heavily voted into a negative category such as “fake news” can be flagged, but not blocked. Users should still be allowed to see it and vote it back into the “truthful news” category. Articles and ads can be voted “obscene” or “unobjectionable.” Ads can be voted “right-wing” or “left-wing.”
The categorizations wouldn’t be permanent and could change as more users vote.
Protecting Innovation
Then how do individual inventors and entrepreneurs compete against these behemoths with their incredible resources without government protection? It should be done the old-fashioned way, through good old American ingenuity, venture capital investing, and protection of intellectual property in the form of patents, trade secrets, and copyrights.But it’s a strong patent system that actually protects the little guy.
In summary, government antitrust lawsuits won’t work, just like they haven’t worked in the past. If the tech giants continue to act as a publisher by selecting and blocking content, rather than as a platform that allows all content, then the government should stop protecting them from lawsuits. Ideally, the tech giants could implement a democratic solution to content rating and selection and, in doing so, continue to get government protection from lawsuits.
And if we expect new tech companies to sprout and grow, with better ways of keeping the public informed and engaged, we need to reverse course with the patent system by strengthening it, not weakening it, so that many more technology choices become available to the public.