The war between Silicon Valley and Washington takes a new turn
politico.com
politico.com
I'm a bit confused by the framing here, that Silicon Valley is punching back.
There's plenty of text and quotes in the article suggesting that Silicon Valley is switching sides; they're doing it because of who is coming to power and/or because of who is losing power.
That's not asserting power or punching back to my mind. That's jumping in at the end of a knockout fight and kicking the losers, trying to blend in with the winners.
Conservatives: It's wrong for the government to tell businesses how they should operate. Businesses should be allowed to operate as they like, in order to serve their customer base and make a profit. Don't like it? Then start your own competitor!
Tech companies: * do things that conservative lawmakers don't like *
Conservatives: Now just wait a minute now!
Unless the companies are monopolies.
Do you include oligopolies like Apple, Google who don’t have monopoly in the phone market but both banned the same apps?
What if there were 5 (50?, 500?) competitors that all independently decided it was economically beneficial for them to ban the same thing?
Hard to say. They written books about monopolies, I would not be able to explain it a single comment.
For Twitter it's clear (to me) it's kind of monopoly: if you a politician (or commercial company), it's critical to you to have twitter to access your electorate (or customers).
> Do you include oligopolies like Apple, Google who don’t have monopoly in the phone market but both banned the same apps?
Yes, I completely agree that these companies need to be regulated. In particular:
* 30% tax seems arbitrary
* app moderation policy is anti-competitive
* promotion of own services (like Apple TV+) on iPhones is again anti-competitive
> What if there were 5 (50?, 500?) competitors that all independently decided it was economically beneficial for them to ban the same thing?
I don't have an answer to that question.
But I believe that Trump/Parler bans have nothing to do with economical benefits.
Agreed. They're more along the civil rights dimension.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act didn't mandate equal access because of Big Restaurant or Big Bus Stop--it was because segregation was an exceedingly immoral, dehumanizing, discriminatory action against millions of people.
That Big Tech finds half the country so odious they are willing to ban them is pretty gross to me. I think people should be served, as humans, irrespective of their beliefs. I don't think it matters whether those beliefs are religious or political (the new religion for a lot of people).
This doesn’t make sense to me, companies are obligated to make the most possible money for their shareholders. Otherwise their shareholders withdraw investments and invest elsewhere. Deplatforming is a money making strategy (it might succeed or it might fail but the goal is to make money).
To add more data, in Nov 2020 7 MM more “potential customers” voted for Biden compared to Trump. Additionally, the “potential customers” that voted for Biden were predominantly younger i.e. more time to purchase good and services from company X. It seems clear to me deplatforming is a medium-term and long-term financial numbers game.
> The 1964 Civil Rights Act didn't mandate equal access because of Big Restaurant or Big Bus Stop--it was because segregation was an exceedingly immoral ...
The way I see this is:
Historically we thought free market economics only applied to the monetary aspect of socio-economics. “deplatforming”/“cancel culture” seems to be the free market “solution” to social issues. It is basically the “popular vote” weighted by capital, forcing social change.
Historically social issues were dictated by one person one vote and required government regulation, and moved very slow (for many reasons, one of them being a disproportionate voting power to low population states). Perhaps we are now witnessing the efficiency of the free market to solve social issues?
Which is an interesting/ironic result, given historic Republican policy about free markets.
P.S. FWIW, I’d be happy with more regulation in this area, even though the free market “solution” is in my favor.
Is this what free-love 1960s San Francisco has been reduced to?
Are we at a point where Texans are the new hippies?
This is sad. If you want to know why Americans might be angry at Silicon Valley, please look at the callousness of that comment.
What “ought to happen” and what “is happening” are very different things.
My previous comment describes what “is happening”: Companies are trying to make money and are making decisions about how to maximize profit. This is the society we have collectively built!
Meanwhile, as a student of Hume I cannot hope to describe what “ought to happen”. I can only speculate that (as I said previously) we need more regulation to ensure everyone is treated “fairly” (whatever ought that might imply).
I agree with you. All people should be treated fairly!
I hope we can soon live in a world that uses “one person one vote” for all societal decisions, that seems most fair to me.
However, whatever your politics might be, please understand: A true “one person one vote” does also mean that both the Senate and the Electoral College need to be rectified.
How do you square away that fact with your simplistic characterization of conservatives as okay with anything big business does?
Edit: haha downvoteas for an honest question
Anytime the Democrats propose some regulation, Republicans will pipe up about how the government just needs to leave businesses alone, how it's wrong to interfere; sometimes they'll call it 'socialism' just to hammer in the point of how much they hate it.
So they characterize themselves this way. But that doesn't stop them from abandoning their supposed principles the second it's inconvenient.
Beliefs change. We see it in the senate taking up the cases into twitter and facebook. The party is shifting. Trump was not a traditional pro corporate republican. His doj is trying to punish monopolies. Many in the gop base, including myself, cannot stand congressional Republicans embrace of corporations (although many of us are seeing the democrats embrace big money too -- biden had more bank donations than trump -- and are equally disgusted). And honestly democrats who agree should reach out now to the shifting base. They might gain voters. That's the point I'm making.
But one party constantly talks about how businesses should be left alone as a principle, then immediately abandons that as soon as it works against them. It's naked hypocrisy.
But there's another hypocrisy to go around as well. The left used to talk about "the best way to combat speech is with more speech" and that monopolies were evil and that Big Oil had too much power and that the Patriot Act was undue surveillance.
We now have a Democratic party deeply committed to restricting speech in the public arena, whether that's academia, social media, or cancel culture in general. They are backing tech companies which are the closest things to monopolies and 10X bigger than Exxon Mobil ever was. They're advocating for new measures on domestic surveillance for terrorism.
Oh yeah, and Net Neutrality was overturned and the ISPs didn't ban things. It was the people who argued for Net Neutrality (Google, Twitter, Facebook) that are committing all the horror stories that were supposed to happen with deregulation.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/media/reliable-sources-ja...
Private companies have completely controlled media, and in the television age have been extremely biased. Trump would never have had any success without Fox News cheering him on and giving him biased fawning coverage.
If anything, Twitter and Facebook have been too subservient to political power by letting flagrant and harmful TOS violations just float for these folks.
Traditional media is more responsible for the rise of Trump than any social network, IMHO. There's been a consistent lack of journalistic ethics, of subservience to white supremacy and an unwillingness to report on it. How many diners in small towns is The NY Times going to report on without talking about the confederate flags and Camp Auschwitz symbols that unify these extremists?
We are at the Beer Hall Putsch stage right now. We have a long war against fascism ahead of us. I wish that Politico would report in the journalistic failures of traditional media with 1/10th the ferocity they have against social media.