Kelly Armstrong and Pramila Jayapal are not what you would call natural political allies. Armstrong, a first-term congressman representing North Dakota’s only congressional district, is a conservative Republican whose campaign priorities include restricting abortion and protecting the rights of gun owners. Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, represents the uber-liberal Seattle area and has introduced one of the most ambitious Medicare for All proposals.
And yet, at last week’s Big Tech antitrust hearing, the two lawmakers could hardly have been more on the same page, tag teaming Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers and Sundar Pichai on self-treatment in Google’s digital advertising business. If you voted at the hearing in search of partisan antics and evidence that Congress is hopelessly broken, Republicans Jim Jordan (who impressively pulled a reference from Michael Flynn in an anti-trust hearing) and Greg Steube (who ‘ t stood for the right of quack doctors to tout hydroxychloroquine) supplied the goods. But the Armstrong-Jayapal connection could end up with a lot of narration. It’s true that the pressure to get the giants into the Silicon Valley giants’ early momentum in Washington from Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and chairman David Cicilline, anti-trust committee. But the hearing, and in particular the performance of Armstrong and fellow Republican Ken Buck, delivered a rare glimpse of hope that members of Congress can still work casually across the aisle, wrestling with tough issues and drawing conclusions based on proof.
“For some reason, both sides of the aisle were deeply concerned about the power that is in the hands of the big tech companies,” Buck, a Colorado representative, said in an interview after the hearing. also Facebook founder Mark included Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Democrats, he theorized, come more naturally to the issue because it fits with their general concerns about the predictions of corporate America. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more concerned about the platforms’ control over information, especially the view, widely accepted on the right, that companies discriminate against conservative users. (There’s quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, but conservatives aren’t crazy about worrying about a bunch of Silicon Valley liberals holding the keys to online communication.) Still for Buck, a member of the Tea Party Party-inspired House Freedom Caucus, it took some time to warm up to the idea of increasing regulation of big business.
“I was one of those people who believed the market could correct itself – until I saw the cheats,” he said. During the subcommittee’s investigation, which began in June 2019, Buck heard stories from small business owners convincing him that the tech giants got away with playing unfairly because of their size. “You can’t cheat like that unless you have a monopoly,” he said. (At the hearing, the CEOs of each company generally denied any anti-competitive behavior.) Eventually, Buck made connections between monopolization and other issues that plagued him across the platforms, such as their possible use of slave labor, which he pointed out. any CEO to refuse. The basic problem, as he sees it, is that the companies have become so large, and have so little competition, that they are not disciplined by the preferences of consumers.
Buck also worries about America’s global competitiveness. “I commend them for building these gigantic companies from very humble beginnings, but you can not allow companies now to scratch innovation because they have become so big,” he said. He cited the example of PopSockets, a successful phone accessory maker whose CEO testified in January that Amazon “plagued” his company and, after closing his company, allowed counterfeit versions of its products to sell on its platform – ultimately costing PopSockets $ 10 million. dollars in lost revenue. “The reality is, the way we got a dominant position in the tech sector is because we encourage innovation,” Buck said. “And if we stop encouraging innovation, we can dominate in certain areas for the next five or 10 years, but 20 years down the road we will not dominate.”
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