TED CRUZ VERSUS BIG TECH.

Back in August, U. S. Senator Ted Cruz rose in agitation against the greatest corporate success stories in American history. During a media interview, and in a tweet, the onetime Republican presidential candidate described global tech giants — Google, Facebook, Twitter — as totalitarians, a threat to democracy, and much more.

Cruz: “I think it is profoundly dangerous, the power that Big Tech has drawn in. We have a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires that are the new robber barons. But they actually have a level of power that at the height of yellow journalism, no one could have imagined. They have declared themselves the arbiters of what is allowed to be said, of what is not allowed to be said, and it is profoundly dangerous. … ( They) are the single greatest threat to free speech, to our democratic process, to free and fair elections that we have in the entire country, and I think solving their increasing totalitarianism and power is an enormous challenge going forward.”

So mark Republican Cruz down as one of the victims of TDS — Tech Derangement Syndrome — a political/psychological condition that is COVID- like in its spread through all ideological perspectives. Left, right, middle — makes no difference. Symptoms include: Extreme language, total unawareness of the nature of corporate competition and market economics, distorted perceptions, extreme self- serving bias, and a tendency to demagogic hyperbole.

The TDS pandemic, already raging in political and media circles as part of the already dangerous U. S. election, reached new levels of intensity over the past few days and peaked Tuesday with the U. S. Justice Department’s launch of an antitrust suit against Google. The document begins cutely: “Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone.”

Is this a lawsuit or a public relations stunt? The suit goes on to say that Google is guilty of “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general searches, search advertising, and general search text advertising … through anti-competitive and exclusionary practices.”

Google’s practices violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a 130- year- old antitrust law that has declined in legal power over the decades as the courts and economists determined corporate competition is a process that generates constant market change and improvement.

The story of the great corporate “monopolists” of the past, from IBM to Microsoft and back in history to Standard Oil and other robber baron myths, demonstrate that “monopoly” allegations — and warnings of “totalitarianism” — are figments of political imaginations and the work of people with other agendas. Just this week, for example, IBM stock took another beating as it continued to get chased out of the “monopoly” it allegedly once controlled.

The Google- based revival of antitrust activity this week should serve as another warning to all businesses and corporations in America and elsewhere that TDS is not just about big tech. It also threatens to create new legal structures that will aim to bring more political and bureaucratic control over corporations and across the free market system.

The evidence for this is everywhere, but it is especially obvious in another Washington TBS outbreak — last week’s 450- page report from the U. S. House Subcommittee on Antitrust.

While the Google lawsuit is a Republican effort backed by several states, the antitrust subcommittee is a Democratic product that aims to use the tech sector as a launch pad for a major expansion of U. S. antitrust laws and their application by the courts. In the words of the antitrust enthusiasts at the Brookings Institution, the report is “a timely and persuasive call to action for the next Congress and administration. It updates progressive thinking on how to bring giant corporations under social control law and regulation.”

The subcommittee report calls for beefed up U. S. laws and enforcement by “Reasserting the anti- monopoly goals of the antitrust laws and their centrality to ensuring a healthy and vibrant democracy.” The 130-year-old Sherman Act needs new clauses, it said, “including by introducing a prohibition on abuse of dominance and clarifying prohibitions on monopoly leveraging, predatory pricing, denial of essential facilities, refusals to deal, tying, and anticompetitive self-preferencing and product design.”

Combined, Tuesday’s Republican- led Google lawsuit and last week’s House Democratic investigation into the digital economy represent a full- bore attempt to revive the antitrust campaigns and hysteria of a century ago. Sally Hubbard of the Washington- based Open Markets Institute neatly summed up the motives behind the spread of Tech Derangement Syndrome. She said that thanks to the House subcommittee report, the Google case and other tech investigations at the state level, “the anti- monopoly movement to hold big corporations accountable is taking centre stage in America.”

The third element at centre stage is this week’s TDS outbreak over an initial Twitter/facebook decision to interfere with the New York Post’s report on the affairs of Hunter Biden and his business relationship with Joe Biden. Twitter has taken hits from both sides, first for blocking the Post’s report as an election decision, and then for removing the block.

It is interesting, though, that when Ted Cruz tweeted out last August that the tech executives — including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey — are free- speech suppressing totalitarians, the tweet was not taken down. It is still there. Those tech execs sure are flabby totalitarians.