The Bipartisan Antitrust Crusade Against Big Tech.

• Author: Brown, Elizabeth Nolan

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 cheered the lawsuit on. Parler, the story went, had been taken down by the left-leaning forces of BigTech, which feared Parler's power as a conservative competitor. The site was deployed as a case study in the dangerous power that technology companies allegedly can wield over private speech.

Yet the story wasn't so simple. Before long, Parler found a new web hosting provider, Epik, which also hosts the right-leaning network Gab. In the end, Parler wasn't disappeared by jealous competitors with absolute power over online speech. And it didn't need the government to force Amazon into a business relationship with it. It simply found a new online home, one better aligned with its values.

Republicans held up Parler's lawsuit against Amazon as an illustration of why antitrust is a useful corrective to the power of tech behemoths. Instead, it showed that competition is alive and well in the tech sector. But it was also a telling indicator of the way that the politics of antitrust have evolved.

Not long ago, it would have been odd to find Republicans backing Parler's dubious antitrust claims. After all, Parler's argument was that the government should order Amazon to do business with a company it didn't want to associate with. It was an argument for government force--not a free market but one engineered by authorities to achieve a specific desired outcome.

Historically, Republicans have been reluctant to support such action. Consider the fights put up in recent years over mandates that businesses provide services for same-sex weddings or employee health insurance plans that cover contraception. But tech companies have come to occupy a central place in the culture wars, with many users convinced that Twitter, Google, Facebook, and their ilk are biased against conservatives. In response, they have come to support legislative and regulatory solutions that are both wildly out of proportion and poorly targeted to the particular problems they claim to have identified. In addition, many calls for antitrust action against Big Tech are premised on notions about the law that are simply wrong.

One misguided proposal from the right is to overhaul or demolish the liability shield law Section 230, which says the law shouldn't treat computer service providers as the speakers of user-created content. But using antitrust law against tech companies has also become a popular play. And in conservative anti-tech discourse, the two have often become intertwined. Tucker Carlson, for example, has wrongly claimed on his Fox News show that antitrust regulators have the power to change Section 230.

The conservative case against Big Tech frequently seems to be divorced from any meaningful sense of how antitrust law works. While grilling tech CEOs during a congressional hearing last summer, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) admonished YouTube for taking down a video about hydroxychloroquine curing COVID-19. Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), notably, criticized the company for not doing so more quickly. But the First Amendment--not antitrust law--governs decisions about speech (and means that with some broad exceptions, private actors can allow or suppress whatever types of speech they like on their own web property).

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Big Tech's loudest critic on the right, has defended antitrust action to break up Google and Facebook and wondered in 2019 whether platforms like Facebook should "exist at all." He has suggested that Facebook choosing to block a link to a specific article of questionable veracity--in this case, a 2020 New York Post story alleging a scandal involving Hunter Biden--is an abuse of monopoly power, instead of a legal, if perhaps misguided, exercise of First Amendment rights. He has argued that Facebook effectively holds a monopoly on online speech, saying in October 2020 that the social media service is "a lot like a supermarket-except there's only ONE supermarket in town, and they decide who can and can't shop." (He said this on Twitter.) In April he introduced both the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act, which would heavily restrict large corporate mergers, and the Bust Up Big Tech Act, a bill aimed primarily at splitting Amazon and Google into smaller companies.

Hawley's lament is indicative of the larger movement: Republican lawmakers have proposed using antitrust action as an all-purpose cure for all manner of alleged tech industry sins. But under Trump, their complaints coalesced most around these...