No, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not monopolies. They are hugely popular, at least for the moment, which gives rise to the appearance, if not the reality, that they own the new digital public square. The problem is that the square isn’t public, and it’s only the new public square because that’s where people hang out. Nobody forces people to go there. Nobody prevents people from going to the real public square. This is just what people choose to do.
And nobody elected Zuck, Jack or any other tech scion to be the defender of either free speech or protector from hate speech. To the extent they are, that’s their choice, whether because of their personal views or market conditions. You’re entitled to your views. They are too.
Arguments abound that these private enterprises are monopolies because they have enormous, too much, control over the digital village square and people’s ability to be heard. They are too popular. Too powerful. Too cavalier. Except that’s not what makes a company a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But this could be.
This week, British feminist blogger Kellie-Jay Keen received a surprise email from Zoom: “We’ve detected an issue with your account that violated our Terms of Service and Community Standards” regarding “hateful conduct.” The email primly informed her that “there is no place on Zoom” for anyone who threatens or harasses others on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease.
The dummy text concluded with an ominous warning likely to strike panic in any mother of school-age children: “Please note that further violations may result in the permanent suspension of your Zoom account.”
What was Keen’s “hateful conduct?” Zoom never said—as these tech companies rarely do. The purpose of the tech giants’ Star Chamber is not to inform, but to instill fear. To encourage self-censorship. To persuade you to reform yourself—so that the overlords have no cause to visit you once more.
Abigail Shrier likens Zoom to a telephone, a conduit through which something is transmitted. It hosts nothing. It’s just the tubes, where someone puts sound and images into one end and it comes out the other. What could it possibly know or care what that sound or image is? But if the sound or image offends someone, and they realize that it came to fruition with the use of Zoom, they can eradicate its existence by making Zoom’s complicity.
No, you’re saying to yourself right about now. That’s no different for Zoom than Facebook, both private companies making decisions about who they choose to service, as is their right. Yes, indeed, but we haven’t yet gotten to the crux of the problem.
But here’s the interesting thing about this latest Big Tech escalation of the censorship game: Zoom isn’t a content host. It’s more like a visual telephone that allows her to speak to her mother, who has been in isolation since the start of the pandemic, and friends she cannot visit in person. It permits her four children to attend school. It is arguably closer to a common carrier, like an airline, than a website—insofar as it transports us across the globe. If Netflix is like a movie theater, highly selective about which movies it shows, and YouTube is like public-access television, then Zoom is much closer to a telephone. It isn’t supposed to care about the content of our calls.
What’s next? Could Apple disable Keen’s iPhone’s operating system? Could Norton refuse virus protection for the troublemakers whose views don’t click into place? Is there never to be any recourse against Big Tech companies who have bought up all the real estate where our work occurs, the public spaces where we meet our friends, and who hold our most private and sensitive data? (Truly, the ability to blackmail any of us resides on their servers.) Build your own Zoom, is it?
It’s one thing to argue that Facebook can’t be forced to provide its service to anyone it doesn’t want to, but what happens when your kid can’t go to school because Zoom doesn’t like the curriculum. On the other hand, you won’t need Norton antivirus if no ISP will sell you internet access.
Another alarming story from this week: Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, a conservative exploration of the transgender movement. The hardback, the paperback, the audio and even the used copies sold through third parties suddenly disappeared from the “world’s largest bookstore.” That same day, Apple removed the two-year-old book from its own offerings. Also on that very day: Twitter determined that the book’s cover amounted to “offensive content.”
If Jeff Bezos said to himself, “damn, I don’t want to sell this book, and I don’t have to,” that would be his right. And Jack Dorsey came to the same conclusion as well on the same day, how fortuitous. An issue arose, the tech bosses independently reached the same conclusion and acted upon it as is their right. So what’s the problem?
The apparent coordination by Amazon, Apple and Twitter might seem like a straightforward violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits agreements in “unreasonable restraint of trade” that harm consumers.
If there was a discussion, an agreement, “coordination” as Shrier calls it, then there’s a trust in restraint of trade. But just because they each reached similar conclusions at about the same time doesn’t mean there was any coordination. As Shrier contends, it would be nearly impossible to overcome the requirements of Twombly to prove they had a secret agreement, and chances are they didn’t. They didn’t need to.
The “monopoly” claimed isn’t the creature of tech giants reaching secret agreements to deny wrong views, ideas, words, books or the people who utter them access to the universe of technology, from platforms to the tubes to get to the platforms. It’s the “monopoly” of the woke, a tacit agreement to exert secondary pressure on every enterprise whose product or service permits the existence of ideas they deem anathema to exist.
But they’re not a business subject to antitrust, and they, too, can exert whatever influence they can muster on secondary businesses that they place in their crosshairs. And if the businesses decide it’s in their best interest to capitulate to the demands of the woke cartel, that’s what they’ll do.
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Seems like a bad business decision to me. Maybe re-title this post ‘Monopoly of the Stupid’.
What happens is that wokey finger-pointers prowl the Internet, looking for things that could be deemed offensive to any aspect of the dogma. When they find an objectionable author, post or book, they complain everywhere complaint is possible, in a campaign to vote it off the island. That is why the actions of various platforms are all roughly concurrent in time. They are all responding to the same complaint(s), which will only grow in volume until they bow to the hat on the pole.
You have to give them credit, they’ve created an extremely effective weapon.
As long as the platforms tolerate them. But this will be found to have its downside. It is why so many news and opinion websites have dropped comments entirely.
I don’t think that’s the reason at all.
…says the guy who reviews the comments.
Respect.
Woke=crazy + stupid + vicious.
I think the move is on on for those businesses\bloggers affected by the woke on the big platforms to start hosting themselves on other platforms or even their own. Sort of like an electronic samizdat. It will be interesting to see what happens.
You should start a new twitter for the unwoke. You can call it Parler. Have fun!
Don’t laugh at the idea. The price of the tech has come down over the years. etc. and there are certainly enough techies out there to mount a challenge.
I believe a parallel to oligarchy of Big Tech in the seventies would be the auto industry. I remember when “made in Japan” was a joke. Look in any parking lot now.
Competition would solve some of the issues at least.
I’m all for competition, but creating two worlds of ideological echo chambers is not going to end up in harmony.
This is a pretty profound observation, so I seriously doubt many will hear what you’re trying to say. These businesses have made a choice as to where their future bread is buttered, and woke it is. Now that the woke know they own them, they will expand outward to further exert their control.
Apple? Sure, why not? As long as businesses believe it’s in their best interest to pander to the mob, the mob will win and its power will expand.
It seems as if it’s an ultimately unsustainable business model, as the mob will continually cannibalize itself until, eventually, it’s left only with the purest woke of the woke. But until that happens, they’ve chosen their wave to ride.
In the Jim Crow south a business owner, be it a restaurant, hotel or hardware store could prohibit the entry of certain patrons on the basis of their race or color. It seemed fair, because a private property owner should feel free to choose with whom he wanted to associate. The law favored the property owner and violators of the owner’s property rights were treated as trespassers. They could go to jail for entering where they weren’t welcome. Some people thought that was unfair and changed the law. They said you have to treat all comers the same. If your business is open to the public, then it must be open to all of the public.
That was the core issue at state in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, where the govt could tell private business how to behave. But you’ve glossed over the critical distinctions of immutable characteristics that distinguished what constituted suspect classifications and what did not. It was never “treat all comers the same.”
The immutable part is apocryphal. It has come into parlance only in the last couple of decades. The original text did say “all persons” and then said without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, and national origin. Is religion immutable?
On the contrary, immutable was key way back then, and religion was considered immutable. No clue why you claim it’s only came about in the last couple decades, but that’s completely false.
The idea that religion is immutable was one of the ideas that the country was founded on, and precedes the Revolutionary War by several decades. A key principle of religious tolerance was that everyone had their own way of finding God, the meaning of life, and that that directed them towards their faith or denomination; that was much better and more enlightened than religious persecution, forced conversions, inquisitions, and established churches intricately intertwined with government to enforce orthodoxy as was the case in some of the Puritans sects that dominated the early colonies, the English Civil War, French persecution of the Huguenots, and the Spanish Inquisition.
So yes, immutability as concept itself and as applied to religion goes back several centuries.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes
Good old Major Tom’s a junkie.
“no ISP will sell you internet access.” This is the only important one. There are millions of sites to visit and apps to use, but to do any of it you need net access. It will be a race to see who can be worst, the ISPs applying a ‘social credit score’ to use their services, or the Govt licensing you to use an ISP. As usual the Govt will have a monopoly decision in the country you live in, although I expect the ISPs will suddenly all agree you are not worthy of their services. As a variant your social credit score will allow you to visit certain sites and not others, you’re not banned, just controlled…
We still have a long way to go down the hole before the whole industry matures and stabilizes.
I agree that the ISP part is really the most important one (probably the only important one), but I’m less sold on the rest. VPNs exist already and are required by many (most?) companies for WFH.