GOP, progressives form unlikely team targeting Big Tech
WASHINGTON — During most of Donald Trump’s time in the White House, Silicon Valley could regard the legal threats Republicans hurled its way as a sideshow: unfocused, unserious, untenable.
But a campaign launched in a cauldron of conservative grievance — over censorship allegations, complaints of “woke” corporate values and the power wielded by a few Bay Area billionaires — has, in former President Trump’s absence, morphed into something far more worrisome to big business.
The GOP push to break up, or at least punish, Big Tech is now an unexpectedly disciplined movement that is causing corporate concern far beyond the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, as the party’s identity is increasingly focused around reining in the power of large companies.
The shift is shuffling alliances inside the party and out. It is also moving many Republican lawmakers to abandon a decadeslong conservative free market orthodoxy to join progressives in demanding the federal government vastly expand its antitrust operations. The decision by Facebook on Wednesday to extend its ban of Trump from the platform has further propelled the movement.
To many in the GOP, big business has become a more attractive target than big government.
“They had been listening for years to the economists who tell them firms should be able to do anything they want,” said Matt Stoller, director of research for the nonpartisan American Economic Liberties Project, which advocates the dilution of corporate power. “All of a sudden they are confronting an economy and political order where that has become very difficult for them.”
Some of the most aggressive and potentially effective action on the antitrust front, Stoller said, is now being pursued by Republicans. In federal court, he noted it is Republican attorneys general who have been most forceful in their antitrust cases against Google and Facebook, alleging the companies are using illegal, monopolistic tactics to dominate the marketplace and mislead users. The landmark antitrust action against Google filed by the Justice Department was launched in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
The ideological lines are blurring so fast it is hard to keep track of who in the GOP falls where and whether the rhetoric is coming from Sen. Ted Cruz or Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Any massive accumulation of power is bad,” longtime big business ally Cruz, the Texas Republican, tweeted recently, branding “Big Corporations,” “Big Tech” and “Big Hollywood” just as dangerous as “Big Government.”
The antitrust crusaders on the left are skeptical. Both Sanders (I-Vt.) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who launched the #BreakUpBigTech movement before it was in vogue with conservatives, say Republicans remain very much beholden to big business. They point to the big corporate tax breaks championed by the GOP and its blocking a $15 minimum wage.
For some in the GOP, the push begins and ends with sloganeering, with lawmakers more focused on scoring points in the culture wars than in restructuring capitalism. But the shouting over cable news and social media is increasingly accompanied by determined bipartisan policy work.
“There is momentum for thoughtful reforms,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, DCalif. the Silicon Valley progressive who co-founded the Congressional Antitrust Caucus. “But people need to understand antitrust is not a cure-all. We should not give people false hope that it will create more empowerment and equity.”
In Congress, Republican lawmakers are joining Democrats in diving into the weeds of obscure corporate law as they search out ways to undercut the power of large firms. It was clear the movement has evolved beyond just a political vendetta against Silicon Valley during a recent congressional grilling of pharmaceutical companies, when the antitrust concerns raised by Republicans were hard to distinguish from those raised by Democrats on the panel.
Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel hedged on some of the specific plans Democrats laid out for a crackdown on Silicon Valley in a 450-page report released in October, but their own minority report, overseen by Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck, gave tech firms plenty to be alarmed about.
“Guys like me and Ken Buck walked into this thinking the free market can solve this stuff and there really isn’t a role for Congress here,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, one of the Republicans who signed onto the minority report. Now, Armstrong thinks differently.
The conservative said he found himself in hearings about Silicon Valley pursuing the same line of questioning as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I don’t think anybody will be confusing her ideology and mine of being the same, but when comes to this stuff, we were piggybacking off each other’s questions,” Armstrong said.
The conservative fervor for regulation extends all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas opined from the bench in April that tech platforms have become so powerful the federal government should consider regulating them as public utilities.