WE MUST BREAK UP BIG TECH
As the threat from Big Tech grows, continuing to advance such a case requires an ever-narrower definition of what liberty truly means... Not only that, but these companies had willingly thrown open the back door. Largely without understanding what they were doing, Americans had willingly given Big Tech the full details of their inner and outer lives. And Big Tech was willing to hand it over to the government with little prodding. What else were they up to? The more I paid attention, the more I began to recognize the troubling implications of private power that existed at this scale, without transparency or accountability. Since 2013, the power of the Big Tech companies has only continued to grow. These are hardly the garage-basement startups of the 1990s... Rather, Google and Facebook, in particular, are now mega-corporations capable of distorting speech, thought, and behavior – not to mention privacy and data property As part of the spy program PRISM, detailed in information leaked by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been, for years, collecting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, and documents from the internal servers of a “who’s who” of Silicon Valley companies – Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, and a host of others.
rights – on an international scale, exerting unprecedented levels of influence over billions of people. How the Right – and libertarians, in particular – should respond to this development has been a particular focus of mine. I have testified before Congress about the need to make sure competition in the tech marketplace is preserved, debated the issue in places like Newsweek and USA Today , participated in policy symposiums, and discussed the dynamics of corporate power, government policy, and liberty on countless panels. But where I expected to find some agreement with libertarians on the nature of the threat, there very clearly exists a divide on two key issues. The first is whether these companies are truly private, or if they benefit from special government protections – subsidies – that should be reformed or repealed. The second is whether or not private power can be a true threat to liberty. Washington, D.C.-based libertarians at the Cato Institute, Charles Koch Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason magazine, and others, frequently disagree with me on both of these points, arguing that any action by the government against the tech companies – even modifying the laws that govern them – would be antithetical to the principle of small government and to liberty itself. But as the threat from Big Tech grows, continuing to advance such a case requires an ever-narrower definition of what liberty truly means... to the point where our rich tapestry of American liberties is reduced and
26
January 2021
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