The Bipartisan Antitrust Crusade Against Big Tech
IS FACEBOOK A monopoly? Should Amazon be forced to do business with the new social media platform Parler? Is Apple harming its customers—and maybe democracy—by installing the Safari web browser on iPhones? Did Google bully people into using its search engine?
All of these questions have been raised in recent U.S. antitrust probes and lawsuits. The queries are unlikely to result in widespread improvements to the welfare of tech consumers—which, these days, includes just about everyone. Yet some of the country’s top prosecutors, pundits, bureaucrats, and elected officials have made them a priority, often in open defiance of a longstanding principle that says ordinary customers should be at the center of conversations about antitrust.
Under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a bipartisan brigade of policy makers, attorneys general, and activist experts has become committed to excoriating America’s most popular tech companies as evil monopolists, launching complicated claims against them in court, and working to change laws to make these endeavors go down more smoothly.
The motivation for this bipartisan push can be found in partisan politics. For progressive Democrats, it isn’t really about tech companies. For populist Republicans, it’s not really about monopoly power. Instead, in both cases, antitrust has become a broad cover for pursuing pre-existing political agendas. Antitrust law—long understood as a blunt instrument to be used sparingly in cases where consumer interests are in serious danger—is being revived and reimagined by today’s antitrust crusaders as a multitool for prosecuting the public case against Big Tech and taking big or influential companies down a peg.
The new antitrust push is an attempt to expand the control that federal overseers wield over the U.S. business landscape, with little attention paid to what’s good for average Americans. Yet if history is any indication, consumers are the ones who stand to lose.
THE GOP WAR ON BIG TECH
PARLER WAS THE last straw, some said.
A Twitter-esque social network for the MAGA right, it was supposed to be an antidote to the waning culture of free-speech permissiveness on other popular digital platforms and the overwhelmingly liberal bent many conservatives perceived on them. Parler “gets what free speech is all about,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) last June. It’s “built on respect for privacy and personal data, free speech, free markets, and ethical, transparent corporate policy,” the Parler website claims.
But after Trump fans stormed the Capitol on January 6, tech companies took a beating for supposedly allowing the extremism and disinformation that sparked the riot to flourish. Right-leaning platforms like Parler bore the brunt of the blame.
That blame was both deserved and undeserved, depending on how you look at it. Yes, Parler provided a forum for posts planning the January 6 protest that would take a dark turn, as well as for content livestreamed from rioters, threats against Democrats, and promises of further action. But Parler was far from alone in this, and it may not even have been home to the worst of it.
Still, the site’s high visibility as a safe space for Trump supporters made it an easy target. Soon, Apple and Google stopped making Parler downloads available in their respective app stores. (Apple has since let Parler return.) Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the branch of the retail giant that provides cloud computing services—suspended Parler’s account, effectively disappearing it from the internet temporarily.
In response, Parler sued. Among its allegations was that Amazon had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The decision was “designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter,” according to Parler’s January 2021 complaint. (Why Amazon would want to boost Twitter is unclear.)
Many Republicans
