Senate Antitrust Reform Bill Targets Big Tech’s Monopoly Power
The Senate, now under the control of the Democrats, is escalating efforts to reform antitrust law to target anticompetitive behavior by major tech companies.
While the reform effort does not address the problem of big tech’s political interference and censorship, which overwhelmingly favors Democrats, it does include major reforms to competition law aimed at preventing Google and other tech companies from colluding to keep out competitors.
The bill, named the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, targets Big Tech’s exclusionary conduct, adding even more enforcement against the practice than provided by Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
“Exclusionary conduct” refers to business activity that creates or maintains monopoly power by disadvantaging and harming competitors.
It is a critical concept in determining whether a company is behaving in an anticompetitive or monopolistic manner, a determination that, under U.S. law, is not made by analysis of market share alone.
The tech giants are regularly accused of engaging in exclusionary conduct.
For example, Oracle has accused Google of such behavior, in a long-running legal battle that is now before the Supreme Court.
via Forbes:
The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case, Google v. Oracle, which deals with how Google appears to have copied thousands of lines of application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle’s Java without a license, in violation of IP law, to create its mobile operating system Android. “In the ensuing years, mobile search has surpassed desktop. Android now enjoys a duopoly on smartphones in the U.S. and controls 75% of the global market, and Google started paying Apple billions of dollars to become the default search engine. Google has used Android to favor other verticals as well, like YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps. In addition, Android ruthlessly invades consumer privacy—greatly strengthening Google’s data monopoly. Android’s rise was necessary for Google to entrench its market power across search, advertising, data, browsing, email, and other platforms. And this dominance would not have been as easily or profitably achieved had Google paid the license for the APIs in the first place.
Google, Apple, and Facebook have also been accused of engaging in collusive dealmaking, another anticompetitive practice that would be targeted by the bill.
via Politico:
Google and Facebook, the No. 1 and No. 2 players in online advertising, made a secret illegal pact in 2018 to divide up the market for ads on websites and apps, according to an antitrust suit filed Wednesday against the search giant. The suit — filed by Texas and eight other states — alleges that the companies colluded to fix prices and divvy up the market for mobile advertising between them. The allegation that Google teamed up with Facebook to suppress competition mirrors a major claim in a separate antitrust suit the Justice Department filed against the company in October: that Google teamed up with Apple to help ensure the continued dominance of its search engine.
via NPR:
Buried on Page 36 of the Justice Department lawsuit accusing Google of abusing its monopoly power is this remarkable figure: $8 billion to $12 billion. That’s the hefty sum Google allegedly paid Apple for one of the most prized pieces of real estate in the world of online search: default status on iPhones and all other Apple devices. Justice Department investigators say Apple, which does not have its own search engine, hammered out a multiyear deal making Google the default search engine on all iPhones and other Apple products. It meant that Web browser Safari, voice assistant Siri and device query feature Spotlight all made Google the default choice. Clinching default search status on Apple products was a victory of historic proportions for Google.
By preventing similar deals from being made in the future, the Senate bill aims to rein in big tech’s ability to suppress its competition.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
BIDEN HAS LOADED DOWN HIS SWAMP WITH PRO-HIGH TECH FACEBOOK PEOPLE.
Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations
The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being “depoliticized.”
Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to “reduce the amount of political content in News Feed.” He said that Facebook was “continuing to fine-tune how this works” and “we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.”
While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating “community standards” in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to “turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities” would include “groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they don’t violate our policies.”
Zuckerberg’s remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with “content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear,” and for using algorithms that “undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.”
Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebook’s decision before the 2020 elections to stop “recommending that users join political and social issue groups” and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused “a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users’ newsfeeds.”
While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.
The reference to “divisive conversation,” turning down “the temperature,” “fringe political beliefs” and “extremist users,” make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.
In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, “as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally.” He added, “Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.”
A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street J ournal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, “Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul.”
After the Journal makes the lying claim that the “Capitol riot” was the product of “hyper-partisanship,” the article goes on to say that the proliferation of “extremist groups” on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.
That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of “US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities” using platform tools to build large audiences. “Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but ‘Suburban Housewives Against Trump’ appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.”
Facebook’s reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.
“Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize,” Karr said. “This isn’t rocket science.”
It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.
Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policies—especially the response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.
Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.
The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist system—the source of the fascist menace—and for socialism on a world scale.
THESE ARE THE BIGGEST CORPORATE MONSTERS PLUNDERING AMERICA TODAY!
Tanden’s financial ties, as head of the Center for American Progress, include $5,000 to $499,999 donations from Apple, AT&T, BlackRock, CVS Health, Comcast NBCUniversal, Goldman Sachs, Lyft, Verizon, Uber, Walmart, the Bank of America, Amazon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan Chase, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and Wells Fargo.
Watch: Biden OMB Nominee Neera Tanden Grilled for Taking Millions from Wall Street, Big Tech
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Neera Tanden, was grilled by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) for her financial ties to Wall Street firms and tech corporations.
Tanden, currently the CEO of the left-wing Center for American Progress and a longtime ally of failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was questioned by Hawley for the organization’s donor list, which includes Wall Street investors, Big Tech, and foreign governments.
“Do you think that Wall Street and Big Tech companies have too much influence in our economy and society today,” Hawley asked Tanden to which she responded “Yes.”
Hawley then asked Tanden to explain how she would “advocate for working people given this history of soliciting tens of millions of dollars from the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet?”
The exchange went as follows:
HAWLEY: I also … I am glad you say that, I agree with you and I’ve talked for years now about these concentrations of power, how they stifle small business owners, and ultimately hurt working people. I want to ask you about a report from the New York Times and other outlets suggesting that you solicited tens of millions of dollars in donations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley companies as president of the Center for American Progress, including very large contributions from Mark Zuckerberg.
I understand that in early 2019, Sen. Sanders actually wrote to your organization, suggesting that these corporate interests may be inappropriately influencing your work. Can you just give a sense of how you will, if you’re confirmed as OMB Director, how you will advocate for working people given this history of soliciting tens of millions of dollars from the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet?
TANDEN: Senator, if the role of OMB is to serve the public and I am 100 percent committed to that role, and let me say that just to be clear, I believe that the Center for American Progress took funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, not Mark Zuckerberg directly. But I completely take the point about concerns about funding. I can commit to you that I will always uphold the highest ethical standards, I will work with career folks at OMB to do so but I will also say that no policy position I have taken has been determined by the financial interest of any single person.
HAWLEY: $665,000 from the personal foundation of Mr. Zuckerberg. Millions of dollars from Wall Street financiers, big banks, foreign governments, Silicon Valley, a million dollars from the managing partner at Bain Capital, $2.5 million from the UAE. That was between 2016 and 2018, given this record, how can you assure us that you’ll work to see that these Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms don’t exercise undue influence — frankly, influence that they’ve already got in the making of government policy and control of our economy.
How can you assure us that you’re going to be an independent actor when you’ve been so close to them and raised so much money over all these years.
TANDEN: I really appreciate that question and I would say that I and the Center for American Progress aggressively … take on the role of Facebook and tech companies, I’ve called for higher taxes on companies, regulations of Wall Street, financial transaction tax. I’m proud of the record of the Center for American Progress and policies that will limit the power of Wall Street, limit the power of tech companies. I would welcome the opportunity to work with you on those ideas because I do agree with you that corporate special interests have too much power in our discourse.
So whether it’s a financial transaction tax or other proposals, obviously I would take my role as OMB Director as one in which I follow the tax policy of the president, but it’s my orientation that we need to rebalance power in our economy and I hope we can work together in those areas.
HAWLEY: Good. I’ll hold you to that.
Tanden’s financial ties, as head of the Center for American Progress, include $5,000 to $499,999 donations from Apple, AT&T, BlackRock, CVS Health, Comcast NBCUniversal, Goldman Sachs, Lyft, Verizon, Uber, Walmart, the Bank of America, Amazon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan Chase, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and Wells Fargo.
Some of the Center for American Progress’ biggest donors in 2019 — ranging from $1 million or more and $500,000 to $999,999 donations — came from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, hedge fund billionaire John Arnold’s Arnold Ventures LLC, and the Ford Foundation.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
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