GOP Obsession With 'Big Tech' Is a Betrayal of Conservatism

Over the last several months, the American people have been subjected to countless hours of Republican politicians in Washington tearing their hair out over the “threat” Big Tech poses to our country. Repeatedly, they've accused them of bias against conservative voices, getting customers addicted to their services, operating “monopolies”, and somehow even degrading American values. 

Until recently, it was a just a few loud voices within the GOP wailing this siren song of big government moralism. But as we saw this week, the obsession over Big Tech's role in our society has spread throughout the Republican Party, with dozens of Members of Congress joining with Democrats in demanding that these companies face new regulations or even to be broken up. In the process, they've abandoned nearly every conservative principle regarding free markets, limited government, and free speech in one fell swoop. 

Frankly, they couldn't have committed a greater act of hypocrisy if they'd planned it. 

For decades, particularly during the Obama administration, we've heard conservatives rail against the “pen and phone” presidency. They've rightly argued that a president using the regulatory state to reinterpret established law and circumvent the will and responsibilities of Congress undermines our constitutional checks-and-balances. Once we allow a president to act as a one-person Congress, they're no longer a president. They're an elected monarch.

But that's exactly what President Trump is doing when it comes to Big Tech. This week, he requested --- nay, demanded --- that the FCC reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 in such a way that internet platforms like Facebook and Google would lose the liability protections they currently have from individuals that use their platforms. 

Congress made it clear in Section 230 that these platforms can't be held liable for users' misbehavior like a newspaper or a TV network would be for their content. Now, the President is directing a regulatory agency --- one that's supposed to be independent --- to directly and blindly subvert the clearly established will of Congress, rather than working with Congress to change the law they passed.

That's not to say that repealing or reforming Section 230 would be a good idea if Congress did it. There's a very simple reason Congress decided not to treat internet platforms like TV networks. TV networks, newspapers, radio, and other traditional media have an immense amount of editorial control over their content. Even massive networks like Fox News and newspapers like the New York Times produce a microscopic amount of content compared to platforms like Twitter. 

Expecting Twitter or Google to apply the same level of control over every single one of the BILLIONS of posts, comments, videos, reviews, and images that appear on their platforms every week is not only impossible, it's dangerous. 

Many conservative proponents of repealing Section 230 claim they want to stop Facebook, Twitter, and others from engaging in biased censorship...specifically censorship against them. These “conservatives” argue that these platforms are purposefully preventing conservative users from spreading their message for political purposes without consequence. 

Their solution? Repeal Section 230 and force the Facebooks of the world to prove that they aren't engaging in political censorship to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who will have the power to mandate what sort of speech they can allow. Of course, as Lois Lerner will confirm, unelected bureaucrats are the pinnacle of impartiality. 

So obviously, these "conservatives" don't have much of a problem with censorship per se. Instead, rather than limit private censorship, they want to expand government censorship. We've clearly seen that in their joy over the idea of banning TikTok.

Failing that, many of them have taken a page out of Elizabeth Warren's book, attacking these private businesses for being too successful and calling for them to be broken up for operating as “monopolies”. 

For the record, these politicians dragged FOUR companies to Washington to yell at them for being MONO-polies. MONO, as in ONE. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Twitter all face brutal competition, from both each other and from other up-and-coming companies, in nearly every field they operate in. Facebook is hemorrhaging users to platforms like Snapchat. Google and Apple compete with each other with their own smartphone operating systems.

Most ironically, Twitter is losing countless conservative users to a new, explicitly free speech platform called Parler. So, while these “conservatives” have been busy abandoning their faith in the free market and competition to solve their problems, the free market has gone ahead and started to solve it for them anyway.

Sadly, that doesn't appear to have deterred them from taking a red marker and writing  “Except when we're owning the libs” at the bottom of the Republican Party platform.