A historic antitrust hearing in Congress has put big tech on notice
On Wednesday’s the world’s most powerful tech CEOs – Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google – were summoned to Washington. There, they were called to testify at the US House of Representatives’ antitrust subcommittee. It was a historic hearing that marks a significant milestone in the battle to rein in Silicon Valley.
The overarching purpose of the hearings was to determine whether the companies had too much market power. Unlike their counterparts at past congressional hearings with tech executives, the subcommittee members arrived well prepared. They presented evidence. Some of the evidence revealed apparent violations of antitrust law, as with internal emails among executives at Facebook and Amazon related to each company’s acquisition of startups.
The subcommittee chair, David Cicilline, and his colleagues demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the business models of internet platforms and the novel forms of anticompetitive behavior they employ. One did not need a detailed understanding of the topic to appreciate the subcommittee’s upper hand, but it helped.
The format of congressional hearings does not lend itself to thoughtful inquiry. The five-minute rule for inquiry prevents a smooth flow, aggravated in this case by the inclusion of four companies, each with different issues. Even so, the hearing shed light on the subcommittee’s investigation. They appear to have enough evidence to justify formal antitrust cases against some of the companies. The subcommittee members’ questions suggest they may be prepared to push for other forms of regulation. Neither of these things was known before the hearing.
American antitrust laws emerged as a response to concentrated economic power throughout the industrial economy more than a century ago. The Sherman (1890), Clayton (1914) and Federal Trade Commission (1914) Acts reflected a belief that monopoly is antidemocratic and should be eliminated even when it creates value in other ways. That framework endured until the Reagan administration, which encouraged concentration of economic power so long as it did not lead to higher consumer prices. The new model, known as the Chicago School, unleashed economic growth and a sustained bull market in stocks, with benefits that were initially widespread, but narrowed to an ever smaller percentage of the population. For the past 20 years, the top 10% enjoyed most of the benefits, especially the top 1%. The country tolerated income inequality while the economy expanded.
Anticompetitive behavior has been the norm in American business for at least a decade. A laser focus on maximizing shareholder value – something which came in with the Chicago School – justified disregard for the interests of employees, the communities where employees live, suppliers and customers. It justified ever greater tax cuts and reductions in government services.
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered an economic contraction, leaving nearly half the population without a job. Supply chains optimized for shareholder value have not been able to produce enough personal protective equipment, cotton swabs or testing infrastructure. A healthcare industry built for elective surgery has struggled to adapt to a public health mission. Internet platforms designed to connect us have undermined the nation’s pandemic response by amplifying disinformation, while also empowering white supremacists.
Questioning the values that left world’s richest economy unable to address a pandemic is no longer the exception. Economic power in nearly every US industry is more concentrated than it has been in a century, but tech has performed best and has more impact on our democracy, public health, privacy and economy. Too much of that impact has been negative. No one doubts the good that comes from internet platforms or smartphones. The doubt comes with respect to the business practices and culture that benefit the few at the expense of the many. People are discovering that it is possible to love the services of Facebook and Google and question whether the benefits justify the harm. They wonder why they cannot have the good without the bad. The antitrust subcommittee hearing reflected all of these issues.
It is possible that the four CEOs anticipated a different kind of hearing. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai shared their own rags-to-riches stories. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tried to position his company’s size as a benefit. Apple’s Tim Cook made a case that his company is different from the others, which is true, though Apple exhibits anticompetitive behavior in its App Store. The CEOs appeared not to understand that the country’s values are changing, that their “users” are less willing to accept all-or-nothing terms, apologies and promises to do better. Business practices that are acceptable in a startup may not be not so for a marketdominant company.
The House antitrust subcommittee must find a way to restore traditional antitrust regulation, while also addressing the new challenges posed by tech giants. When a company operates an ecosystem, what should be the limits on behavior? What rules should govern corporations that build a business around personal data? What responsibility should tech companies and their executives bear for the harms they cause? The answers remain to be determined, but the House antitrust subcommittee has submitted them for the consideration of the nation. That is progress.
Roger McNamee is Managing Director at Elevation Partners and an early stage investor in Google and Facebook
long?
Make no mistake, the presence of lies and hate on these platforms is not some regrettable bug. It is a feature. The business model for social media requires attention – eyeballs – and the best way to get that is engagement. Messages that stir anger, fury and yes, hate, keep people online more effectively than content that is merely interesting or amusing. It’s why studies show that false news spreads faster than true news: the algorithms are designed to favour virality over veracity.
What can be done? There’s no shortage of ideas. Some start with the demand for fact-checking and, after the 2016 election, Facebook took steps in that direction. But when it emerged that one of its fact-checking partners was Daily Caller, a rightwing news website known for pushing misinformation, the scheme’s credibility plunged.
Or, more simply, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter could admit that of course they are publishers and they should therefore take the responsibility that goes with the mighty power they have. If that means hiring a million moderators to check their content, weeding out lies and hate, then so be it. They can hardly cry poverty: these are close to trillion-dollar companies.
If they don’t like the analogy with publishers, then perhaps they’d rather be treated like, say, car manufacturers, who, if found to be delivering a dangerously faulty product, have to recall and fix that product, regardless of the expense. At the moment, the social media giants enjoy legal protection from such liability in the US.
Politicians could change that, just as they could follow Howard’s demands in Lie Machines and break the big companies’ “monopolisation of information” by legislating a citizens’ right to donate their own data to smaller organisations: that way such groups would be more able to compete with the tech giants and those able to pay for their services.
But, as this week’s hearing proved, elected representatives are not powerful enough to do that alone. They’d have to work together, governments across the globe. They’d need the backing of advertisers, withdrawing their pounds and dollars from companies that give a platform to hate. And they’d need all of us to declare we’re sick of this poison in the information bloodstream, and we won’t rest till it’s drained away.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
as a child, for Aja Yasir growing your own food was always a normal way of life. Her parents were a part of the Second Great Migration: the period from 1940 to 1970 when Black people migrated from the south to northern states en masse. Both of her parents brought the practice of subsistence agriculture with them to Chicago, purchasing a vacant lot next to their home in Englewood, on the South Side, to establish a home garden. They weren’t alone; other families in the neighborhood also had home gardens. For Yasir’s parents, the act of growing your own food was bolstered by 1960s and 1970s Black health messaging from the Chicago branches of the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and Chicagobased Black public figures like Dr Alvenia Fulton.
By the time Yasir was born, in the mid-1970s, growing food at home had become an established family tradition – a tradition that was almost broken when in her early adult years Yasir decided she wanted nothing to do with agriculture. Instead, she moved as far away from Chicago as she could, to pursue her bachelor’s degree in Atlanta. But a polarizing global figure would entice Yasir back to the land: the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.
It was late 2005. Yasir had returned to the Chicago area, completed a master’s degree, and was working at a local radio station. A colleague at the station shared an article about Chávez ousting an American missionary group, New Tribes, from Venezuela, accusing them of being imperialists and exploiting indigenous people. Yasir’s interest was piqued. Then, in 2006, she heard Chávez’s United Nations speech, in which he referred to George W Bush as “the devil”, in protest against US global domination. Yasir wanted to investigate the conflicting media images of Chávez – hero of the poor versus villain of democracy. So she left Chicago for Venezuela, with no Spanish and a flimsy local job prospect. She stayed in a town in Barlovento, a region with a large population of Afro-Venezuelans, known for its cocoa production.
Yasir still remembers how fresh everything tasted in Barlovento, and the prominence of locally grown and made food: “You cannot escape agriculture in that town because everybody is doing something involved with agriculture, whether it’s raising chickens in their yard, or growing bananas, or harvesting and making chocolate. Agriculture is just connected like that.” Barlovento made her appreciate her Englewood upbringing, rooted in urban agriculture.
Her reunion with the land would come to serve her almost a decade later. •••
Yasir considers herself to be someone with a lifetime of traumatic experiences, although she prefers not to retraumatize herself by going into detail about a lot of it. However, she did share about a recent anguish. In January 2016, her three-week-old daughter, Yaminah, unexpectedly died, falling victim to a rare genetic condition. The cumulative effects of years of unresolved trauma, combined with losing