Big Tech isn’t patriotic, it’s amoral and cynical

The likes of Google and Amazon claim that Europe is targeting them for being American. That’s laughable

America’s largest tech giants would have the public believe that they’re patriotic firms, fighting the good fight for our values at home and abroad. The truth is that these companies are breathtakingly cynical actors who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes and then discard them at their earliest convenience.

For firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook (Meta) and Amazon to make the case that they are American businesses being unfairly targeted because of their success in order to provide European companies with a competitive edge is disingenuous bordering on laughable, but the tech giants hope to hire enough highly paid lobbyists to smother the truth under a mountain of goldplated rubbish.

But there’s an old saying: by their fruits, ye shall know them. Big Tech’s fruits – their actions – are not patriotic. In fact, they are amoral.

American values of free speech, democracy, free enterprise, tough but fair free market competition, and paying what you owe in taxes (not a penny more or less), seem to be anathema to them. It’s worth going through some of their all-time greatest hits.

One of the core innovations Amazon brought to the e-commerce market was to allow negative reviews on its platform. In doing so, it allowed customers to evaluate potential purchases with a tool that was more powerful than what was available in traditional bricks-andmortar retail.

That went out the window when Xi Jinping published a collection of his speeches on the platform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) required Amazon not to permit negative reviews of the premier’s speeches, and Amazon complied, a privilege they have yet to afford any leader in a democracy.

The company even created a portal for the Chinese market, in collaboration with CCP censors, called “China Books”.

A rhetorical question: if you directly facilitate propaganda for the United States’ primary geopolitical competitor in order to profit, are you still an American company deserving of our considerable clout in protection of that bottom line? To ask is to answer.

Google has covered itself in shame here as well. When the US Department of Defence (an entity I admit is not without its flaws) wanted to partner with the company to develop new battlefield applications for artificial intelligence, an internal revolt from its employees led Google to back out of the project. Meanwhile, Google was busy creating a custom-built search engine for the Chinese market in secret, code-named “Dragonfly”.

This was perhaps a bridge too far even by the low standards of American tech firms, and they cancelled the project under pressure from Congress in 2018. Had they not run into overwhelming public criticism, however, they might still be working with the CCP, ensuring that Chinese citizens would only have access to information approved by the CCP and Xi Jinping.

Apple is hardly blameless. We are told that American manufacturing cannot compete with the flexibility afforded by China. An alternative explanation might be that the United States doesn’t permit its workers to be enslaved in sub-dickensian conditions that have been credibly described as a genocide.

It would be easier to absolve Apple of blame if it had not spent thousands of dollars lobbying against the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, a bill that would have banned the use of slave labour from Xinjiang in American products.

Meanwhile, much of Apple’s tax is paid in Ireland. The company also removed an app from its app store that was used by Hong Kong reformers to organise protests after the CCP passed an oppressive and anti-democratic national security law, helping to crush the movement.

Facebook is banned in China, which helps it to avoid some of the worst hypocrisy, but at least Apple isn’t selling a product that leads to major increases in the suicide rates of teenage girls.

The company is also monopolistic, by the black-letter definition of the word. Mark Zuckerberg is on record as saying that he bought Instagram in order to avoid competing with it, a clear admission of anti-competitive tactics.

The bottom line is this: not every act by the European Commission or the British Parliament is wise or something I would agree with, but I hope these monopolists can’t hide behind the shadow of Uncle Sam and deter the European Union from creating fair competition in the marketplace.

You can call these companies what you want, just don’t call them American.

Ken Buck has represented eastern Colorado in Congress since 2015. He is a leading Republican sponsor of antitrust legislation targeted at large tech companies read more