Articles like this one leave my head spinning.
Sometimes I feel like an Indian watching the first European ships
laying anchor and coming ashore full of promises and double talk.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/30/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
≡
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Steve Bannon Wants Facebook and Google Regulated Like Utilities
Ryan Grim
July 27 2017, 12:31 p.m.
Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. logos are displayed on computer screens in
this arranged photo in New York, U.S., on Monday Jan. 30, 2012. A Facebook
IPO would provide funds to help the social-networking service maintain its
expansion and fend off competition from Internet rivals such as Google Inc.
and Twitter Inc. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. logos are displayed on computer screens.
Photo: Peter Foley/Bloomberg News/Getty Images
Tech companies like Facebook and Google that have become essential elements
of 21st-century life should be regulated as utilities, top White House
adviser Steve Bannon has argued, according to three people who’ve spoken to
him about the issue.
Bannon’s push for treating essential tech platforms as utilities pre-dates
the Democratic “Better Deal” that was released this week. “Better Deal,”
the branding for Democrats’ political objectives, included planks aimed at
breaking up monopolies in a variety of sectors, suggesting that
anti-monopoly politics is on the rise on both the right and left.
Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken
with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity
in
contemporary life. Indeed, there may be something about an online social
network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural
monopoly,
much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad. The
sources recounted the conversations on the condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized to give the accounts on record, and could face
repercussions for doing so.
(It’s not Bannon’s only counterintuitive proposal to float this week: he
has also told people close to him he wants to raise the top marginal tax
rate to 44 percent for people who earn more than $5 million per year.)
Regulating a company as a utility does not mean that the government
controls
it, but rather that it is much more tightly regulated in what it is able to
do and prices it is able to charge. And it doesn’t mean every element of
the company would be regulated in that way. For Google - which now calls
itself Alphabet and has already conveniently broken itself up into discrete
elements - it may only be the search function that would be regulated like
a
utility.
Under the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission moved
forward on a plan to regulate internet service providers as utilities,
barring them from slowing down traffic to a site in order to pressure it
into paying higher fees. The Trump administration is pushing to reverse
that
move, which complicates Bannon’s message.
Bannon’s argument is bolstered by an unlikely player: Facebook founder and
CEO Mark Zuckerberg. For years, Zuckerberg routinely described Facebook as
a
“social utility.” Indeed, it was originally part of the company’s slogan.
In an interview in 2007 with Time magazine, he was asked to elaborate on
what had become a central talking point.
Time: Why do you describe Facebook as a “social utility” rather than a
“social network”?
Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social
networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks
have different goals - some serve the function of business networking, some
are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient
for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always
try to emphasize the utility component.
The emphasis on the utility component has disappeared now that Zuckerberg
is
surrounded by lawyers well versed in monopoly laws, but the argument is as
resonant today - in fact, more so - than it was a decade ago.
Tech companies, meanwhile, have feuded publicly with the administration,
particularly over its decision to back out of the Paris climate accord, a
move driven by Bannon.
Silicon Valley’s liberal cultural politics puts it at odds occasionally
with more conservative, rural Trump voters. Facebook was confronted by a
backlash over its news curating during last year’s presidential campaign.
With insiders claiming there was an anti-conservative bias, Facebook pulled
its live team off the project. Instead, the social media giant turned its
curation over to an algorithm that had little ability to detect whether an
article had been utterly fabricated, giving rise to the explosive growth of
“fake news” (before the moniker morphed into a description of any news a
reader objects to).
Silicon Valley caught on late to the Washington game. In 2011, Sen. Pat
Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, complained that
Google had waited too long to hire an armada of lobbyists. “Sometimes a
company should pay attention early on, not just when matters happen,” he
said. “But I can’t tell them, nor would I, who they should hire or not.”
Google was playing catch up at the time, and hiring every committee staffer
who wasn’t nailed down. “I consider myself a public works project right
here,” Leahy said of the antitrust investigation he was leading. “My
colleagues call it the Leahy Full Employment Act.”
They have since caught up: In the first few months of the Trump
administration, tech firms set new lobbying spending records in Washington.
