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One Thing to Pay Attention to in Tech’s Big Antitrust Hearing: Power
Is tech ‘breaking our democracy’? It’s beside the point.
As the leaders of four top tech companies testify in Congress today on antitrust issues, there’s a point that I think deserves some quick elucidation.
There is a strand of thought that ties the problems of online speech and digital media to the market dominance of, for example, Facebook, and recasts them as antitrust issues. While I think there is some nexus there, I worry it has confused a lot of people as to what this hearing, and the broader inquiry of which it is a part, is supposed to be focused on.
Whether or not the online speech problem is wholly or partly an antitrust problem, there are also real antitrust problems with the largest tech companies that have little to do with questions of hate speech, misinformation, sensationalism, “breaking our democracy,” etc. Let’s set Facebook aside for the moment for argument’s sake, and consider the other companies represented at today’s hearing. Amazon, Apple, and Google have all built dominant platforms of different kinds, which now play host to thriving online economies. Owning those platforms gives them huge power over the shape of those economies.
