Freedom from Facebook?
With Congress on board, an antitrust movement enters new phase
WASHINGTON — With a name that evokes Norman Rockwell’s essences of American life, the Freedom From Facebook And Google coalition launched in 2018 with a chartered airplane pulling a banner that read, “YOU BROKE DEMOCRACY.”
Less than two years later, the group’s grand campaign tactics have manifested in a more downto-earth, yet more significant, venue: a high-profile Capitol Hill hearing that forced the CEOs of four of the biggest tech companies to the table — at least virtually.
Lawmakers at last week’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, which focused on market power in the tech industry, grilled the heads of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple on a range of anticompetitive practices. The hearing came at a time Silicon Valley is becoming even more entrenched in Americans’ daily lives, as the COVID-19 pandemic boosts reliance on social networking, online shopping and remote meetings.
But Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., chairman of the committee’s antitrust panel, set the tone for the increasingly predominant view in Washington: “Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.” Mr. Cicilline’s panel has been investigating market power for more than a year and is expected to release a report in the coming weeks.
Shaping the debate
In some ways, the hearing was a symbol of the ideological influence of antitrust groups that were founded in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and rose in prominence with each revelation of data breaches, privacy issues and disinformation campaigns.
Freedom From Facebook and Google, a coalition that counts about 19 progressive groups today, was founded to “normalize and mainstream the idea that we need to think about power when we’re dealing with problems, par -ticularly related to huge corporations,” Sarah A. Miller, co-chair of Freedom From Facebook and Google, said in an interview.
At that time, Ms. Miller said, the coalition’s goal was to tie the public’s growing distrust of the tech industry to the complicated economic issue of market con -centration.
In 2018, the coalition filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which roughly 30 million users’ personal data was harvested without consent and used for political advertising purposes.
That FTC probe resulted in a $5 billion fine, the largest in the commission’s history.
“We were relentless about framing the scandals that were plaguing Facebook in the context of their power and their business model,” said Ms. Miller, executive director of The American Economic Liberties Project, which is one of the coalition’s groups. “Over time, we saw more and more voices come on board with that.
“We wanted to show that it was going to come down to policy-makers acting and not Facebook changing or self-regulating itself.”
Different competition
The century-old U.S. laws that govern monopolistic behavior can be difficult to apply to large tech companies today, said Arie Beresteanu, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies market power and industrial organization.
The movement against monopolies harks back to the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and President Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting crusades against industrial conglomerates like Standard Oil.
In 1911, John D. Rockefeller’s mammoth oil company was found to have undercut competitors by owning every step of the production, refining and marketing, and was ordered to be split into 34 companies under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
Almost a decade later, U.S. Steel — which became the world’s first $1 billion corporation by combining Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire with other mills, coal mines and transportation networks — survived a similar challenge.
In those days, regulators assessed mergers, predatory pricing and supply chain shenanigans, Mr. Beresteanu said. Facebook’s power today, by contrast, is enabled in large part because of the “network effect” that derives value from the number of people using it. The bigger the network, the bigger the barrier for competitors.
“These companies are very different from companies we know from the past,” Mr. Berest-eanu said, suggesting lawmakers may have to interpret the obsolete laws or write new ones.
One of those laws governing Big Tech falls under the purview of Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, who chairs a subcommittee on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees telecommunications policy.
Mr. Doyle has convened hearings in recent months on disinformation, taking aim at a 1996 law that allows companies to self-police their online platforms for bad actors. Mr. Doyle has argued that law, known as Section 230, has allowed hate speech — as well as false claims about COVID19 and mail-in balloting from President Donald Trump — to flourish.
“We said: ‘Either police yourself, or you’re going to bring regulation upon yourself from us, and you’re not going to like it,’” Mr. Doyle said in a recent interview.
He called the antitrust efforts “something we’re all looking at and keeping an eye on.”
Different reasons for distrust
Though antitrust advocates have found bipartisan momentum in Washington, the Trump administration and Republicans view the tech giants’ power through a different lens — raising the question of how the parties could work together on any antitrust effort.
“I’ll just cut to the chase: Big Tech’s out to get conservatives,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
Other Republicans seemed skeptical of government overreach.
“Big isn’t inherently bad,” Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
“You have enjoyed the freedom to succeed,” said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo. “I do not believe big is necessarily bad. In fact, big is often a force for good.”
Ms. Miller, in the interview, said the theory that tech platforms were censoring conservatives was unfounded. But fears of any political influence in the moderation of content would be allayed with a better distribution of power in the tech industry.
Furthermore, lawmakers from both parties asked sophisticated questions, said David Segal, executive director and co-founder of the activism organization Demand Progress and the co-chair of Freedom from Facebook and Google.
That was an improvement from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance on Capitol Hill in April 2018, when lawmakers seemed woefully unprepared and unfamiliar with social media.
“We think we succeeded in expanding the scope of the conversation,” Mr. Segal said.
The COVID-19 pandemic “underscores the notion of how dominant they are,” he added. “These are very much the robber barons of our time.”