Is Trump throwing free speech down the toilet to protect Big Tech monopolies (and the stock market)?
02/21/2020 / By JD Heyes
It’s been well documented that the country’s tech behemoths have routinely engaged in censorship and outright bans of conservative and independent media reporting news and opinions that run afoul of their Left-wing sensibilities.
But what’s been puzzling is why President Donald Trump has not done much about it.
It’s not that the president hasn’t noticed. In March 2019, as NewsTarget reported, Trump called out big tech for colluding with the Democrat Party to silence conservatives ahead of the 2020 election:
Liberty-minded tech startups and independent media publishers have been pleading with President Donald Trump to take on the conservative bias and potential anti-trust violations by the Big Tech giants and he’s finally done it.
“Actually it’s incredible that I won the election because you know it was so rigged against me,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News. “It wasn’t Russians. Russia collusion was a delusion. But what there is, is there was collusion between the Democrats and these tech companies.”
In July, an explosive video released by Project Veritas featured an interview with a Google engineer who stated unequivocally that the tech giant purposely alters its news/search algorithms to reflect an anti-Trump bias, The National Sentinel reported.
“Google News is really an aggregator of just a handful of sites and all of those sites really are vitriolically against President Trump, which I would really consider to be interference in the American election,” Dr. Greg Coppola told PV.
So why hasn’t the president instructed his administration to act against this obvious bias? Aren’t Google and just a handful of other tech giants that dominate the Internet and censor opposing political views guilty of textbook anti-trust violations?
Not according to the president’s economic team.
President Donald Trump’s economic advisers are skeptical about rewriting antitrust rules to tackle the growing power of tech giants, according to the latest annual Economic Report of the President. The Council of Economic Advisers argue that the monopolistic power wielded by the Masters of the Universe are signs of “competitive success.”
What’s ‘competitive’ about censorship?
The annual report, produced by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, pushes back against the notion that market concentration of just a few tech giants isn’t a good thing for consumers — though throughout our history, the government has worked to eliminate concentrated power and ‘monopolies’ because they are anti-competitive.
The New York Times noted further that the Trump administration, in the report, also argues that studies demonstrating rising market concentration of big tech are actually flawed.
“Concentration may be driven by economies of scale and scope that can lower costs for consumers,” the report reads.
“Also, successful firms tend to grow, and it is important that antitrust enforcement and competition policy not be used to punish firms for their competitive success,” it adds.
Huh?
So, by that logic, it was unwise to break up “Ma Bell,” the Bell Telephone giant, back in the day, because the company was so successful — is that what the report is arguing?
Did the U.S. government during the Reagan administration ‘punish’ Bell Telephone (AT&T) for its “competitive success?”
It’s ludicrous to believe that Google, Facebook, and Amazon — which control nearly 70 percent of all digital ad spending — is ‘competitive.’
Granted, there are other search engines, but Google controls nearly 88 percent of all search engine traffic; how is it possible, then, for Internet surfers to gain access to information that Google censors decide not to promote (like, say, pro-Trump news reports)?
That said, though the president’s Council of Economic Advisers is attempting to justify the market domination (and censorship) of big tech, the Justice Department is taking a different approach, Breitbart News notes.
“In July last year, the DOJ announced an antitrust probe of America’s biggest tech companies,” the site reported, though the disposition of that investigation is unknown.
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Tagged Under: 2020 election, banned content, Big Tech, Censorship, Council of Economic Advisers, Facebook, Google, news aggregate, President Trump
