Google Allies are Politicizing a Pandemic to Avoid Accountability
In 2008, in the midst of our financial meltdown, future-Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel infamously proclaimed: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Following Rahm Emanuel’s playbook today, Big Tech is attempting to capitalize on the coronavirus, the Wuhan-originated pandemic which may cause the biggest public-health and financial crisis we’ve ever faced, by making wholly unrelated demands for: (1) blanket amnesty from antitrust laws; and (2) continued coddling by Uncle Sam (since 1996) in the form of the sweetheart
Section 230 immunity Big Tech enjoys from defamation lawsuits based upon what their users post online (while Big Tech continues to hugely profit from those defamatory posts).
And how does Big Tech justify their unrelated demands during a crisis? Because Google built a single website under pressure from the President of the United States? (Let’s remember, Google didn't build this coronavirus website simply because they are Good Samaritans. Google will likely hugely profit from the massive amounts of personal-health data that it will collect. Again, Google won’t let this crisis go to waste.)
To give you a flavor of just how tone deaf the tech lobby is, consider the recent plea from Google-funded AEI
entitled “COVID-19 has demonstrated the folly of some tech policies.” Among other items, AEI calls for antitrust agencies to drop investigations into platforms like Google because “left to their devices” the agencies “could destroy the very systems that provide critical functions during the crisis.” For AEI, it is as if Google is the Internet; as if Google is single-handedly saving the world from COVID-19, a billion dollars at a time. As if, yet again, Google should be above the law.
In making its argument, AEI misses the entire lesson in COVID-19 for internet policy. It is most certainly not that antitrust investigations into Google should be dropped. Quite the opposite. If anything, the past weeks have shown just how unfulfilled the promise of the internet actually is because of companies like Google. This unfulfilled promise is due to behemoth platforms such as Google that have stymied innovation and competition from upstart rivals that might, actually, have made a difference at a time like this. In other words, the lack of innovation due to Google’s anticompetitive conduct is precisely why we have the sub-optimal internet we have.
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Google Allies are Politicizing a Pandemic to Avoid Accountability