The tech titans: silencing their critics
A “small kerfuffle” in Washington last week revealed “a lot about power in the modern world”, said Emma Duncan in The Times. Barry Lynn, head of the open markets team at the New America Foundation – an influential Washington think tank partly funded by Google – was fired. Why? Because, it seems, he had the temerity to criticise his paymasters. When Google was fined s2.4bn by the European Commission for breaching competition laws, Lynn posted a statement on the foundation’s website praising the decision and calling on the US to follow suit. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, apparently voiced his displeasure, said Kenneth P. Vogel in The New York Times. Soon after, the foundation’s head, Anne-marie Slaughter, summoned Lynn and told him his entire team would have to leave: they were “imperilling the institution as a whole”. Slaughter disputed Lynn’s version of events, without citing any errors. The episode looks like a cautionary tale about what happens when “a wealthy tech giant is criticised”.
Competition law is a sore point for Google, as well as for Facebook, Apple and Amazon, said Olivia Solon and Sabrina Siddiqui in The Observer. By most definitions, all these companies are monopolists: they have massive market dominance, and the power to control prices and exclude competition. In 2012, a US Federal Trade Commission investigation concluded that Google’s monopolistic conduct resulted in “real harm to consumers”. Yet US politicians rejected the recommendation to launch a competition lawsuit of the kind that has broken up US monopolies in the past, from Standard Oil to IBM and Microsoft. How did Google get away with it?
“Old-fashioned monopolies bought legislation directly,” said The Guardian. Nowadays, Google is one of the biggest corporate spenders on lobbying, but it also attempts to shape the entire climate of opinion by funding think tanks, as well as papers written by academics sympathetic to its point of view. The power of big tech today is “unprecedented”, said Duncan. Google has 87% of the search market in the US, and 83% in Britain. Facebook has 79% of the social media market in the US and 77% in Britain. Apple is worth $750bn, more than the entire car industry. Given that these firms also control much of the flow of information, both to us and about us, we should be very worried. “Once upon a time, concerns were commonly voiced about the power of the press barons. Their clout was as nothing to the tech titans’.”