For decades, conservatives have vigorously defended the so-called “consumer welfare standard,” which states that the government should only take antitrust action in the event of demonstrable harm to consumers. Unfortunately, the growth of Big Tech companies has led some to abandon this principled stance on antitrust enforcement in favor of one that is likely to come back to bite conservatives in the end.
Even the venerable Heritage Foundation has begun singing a different tune compared to its previous work, with a recent paper advocating for breathtaking expansions of federal power aimed at taking Big Tech down a notch. That may appear tempting to those angry about social media companies’ sometimes-absurd content moderation decisions, but Heritage scholars and their fellow conservatives helped to articulate and defend the consumer welfare standard for good reason.
Conservatives know that heavy-handed government actions often have impacts far beyond stated goals, impacts that invariably harm consumers. And wielded in the hands of the left-leaning bureaucrats and politicians that dominate Washington, DC, those policies are more likely to harm those on the right than on the left. Restricting antitrust regulation to cases where consumers are clearly being harmed by the status quo cuts down on overzealous antitrust enforcement.
But it’s not just in the antitrust realm that some limited government supporters have made an about-face, it’s also expanded into merger and acquisition rules and regulations surrounding content moderation, among other things.
Take the paper’s claims that Big Tech uses its size to snuff out potential competitors before they can become a threat, and subsequent endorsement of further regulation in the space. While it is true that tech companies often acquire upstart brands, this is no different from other industries, and does not mean that creating a successful competitor is impossible.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Myspace was considered by some to be an unassailable social media monopoly only to be surpassed by Facebook, which is itself now rapidly losing ground to networks like TikTok, the most visited site on the entirety of the internet in 2021. Start-ups often choose to sell early on, when future success is far from guaranteed — indeed, most acquisitions by Big Tech companies bear little fruit. On the other hand, preventing these early-stage acquisitions increases the risk for entrepreneurs, who can no longer choose to sell as an exit strategy.
And while right-leaning Americans may be frustrated by puzzling decisions to ban and restrict conservatives on their platforms, empowering a federal government run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi is likely to make that problem worse, not better. Politicians on the left want to see much more censorship of right-of-center views on the web and are licking their chops at the prospect of greater government control of content moderation.
Any attempt to bypass this reality through the use of antitrust or other regulation is bound to create more grief for conservatives. Instead of focusing on giving government more weapons it can aim at established companies, they should help pave the way toward “Web3” decentralized networks and encourage innovative approaches to content moderation to address legitimate bias concerns, among other actions.
Conservatives should know that asking the government to take a more active hand in enforcing “free speech” will only result in more pain. Empowering big government to “fix” things all too often leads to bigger government without fixing the issues at hand.
