With token exceptions, Republicans don’t want Silicon Valley’s giants to be less powerful, only more more conservative
A former wrestling coach who is not worried about concentrated corporate power. Photo: Mandel Ngan/POOL/AFP via Getty Images For over a year, House lawmakers have been investigating the anti-competitive practices of America’s dominant tech firms. For much longer than that, chatter about an emerging “bipartisan anti-monopoly movement” has been growing in public discourse.
Similarly, Google has allegedly leveraged its dominance of search traffic to direct users to its own products, while forcing other companies to buy ads if they wish to maintain a competitive place in the company’s search results. Amazon supremacy in online retail leaves third-party sellers with little choice but to use its platform — which then gives Jeff Bezos’s company the power to track its competitors’ sales, and use that proprietary data to develop its own alternative brands.
The committee’s Republican lawmakers asked a handful of questions along these lines — which is to say, inquiries about how tech incumbents may be using their power to thwart competition. But the bulk of their queries had little to do with monopoly power as such. Rather, the GOP committee members were chiefly concerned with safeguarding Donald Trump Jr.
Which is not to say that the party’s unease about Silicon Valley’s cultural liberalism is entirely insincere or misplaced. Allegations that Facebook is marginalizing conservative viewpoints are ludicrous, given rightwing media’s dominance of that platform. But it is the case that the men and women who staff the tech sectors’ megafirms — especially, below the C-suite level — typically hold values antithetical to the conservative movement’s.
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