There’s been a lot of push from both left and right for the US government to regulate “Big Tech.” On the right, for example, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, proposes two remediesfor censorship by Big Tech. The first is “for Congress to regulate Big Tech like public utilities or common carriers, compelling them to serve all customers without viewpoint discrimination.” The second is for the Supreme Court to “limit Big Tech censorship.” On the left, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) has a bill titled American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) to regulate large tech companies that she thinks suppress competition. And this is just a shallow dive into the regulatory waters. Both left and right have proposed other regulations of Big Tech.
I’ve got another option: trust freedom to rein in Big Tech. Let other companies compete to provide services that some critics think Big Tech should provide. Will this sometimes happen slowly? Yes, although it will typically happen way more quickly than any government solution. The freedom solution, moreover, will avoid the unintended consequences that come about when government steps in to regulate.
In this article, I’ll focus on the case against what McCaughey advocates. In a subsequent article, I’ll discuss the problems with the kinds of government interventions that Klobuchar and others advocate.
These are the opening paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “Let Freedom Rein in Big Tech,” Defining Ideas, February 17, 2022.
Another excerpt:
In short, the objection to some of Big Tech’s behavior is sound. I don’t think of it as censorship because the term “censorship” has traditionally been used to refer to governments that threaten to use force to prevent people from expressing certain ideas. For example, the Federal Communications Commission, a US government agency, censors. YouTube, by contrast, does not use or threaten force. Instead, it disallows certain viewpoints from being expressed, even if the viewpoints are backed by evidence. That’s troubling and even disgusting, but it’s not censorship. Moreover, YouTube has the right to choose, and should have the right to choose, what content it carries.
Another excerpt:
Here’s another example of competition solving the problem of information suppression, this time by a major search engine. I had never considered using Microsoft’s Bing. Google has been my browser of choice for years. But recently I saw a talk on Zoom in which the speaker said he had been trying, using Google, to find a paper by a Chinese doctor that argued that the coronavirus resulted from a lab leak. He couldn’t find it using Google. He had heard of Bing.
So he went to Bing and put in a few key words and, as he said, “Bing!” There it was.
For an article I’m writing, I had been trying to find a quote from Washington state governor Jay Inslee in which he claimed seriously that he was the only person in Washington state who had the capability to save lives from COVID. Using key words, I had tried for almost an hour on Google to find the quote, but to no avail. So I went to Bing, entered a few key words, and then “Bing!” There it was.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Rob Rawlings
Feb 19 2022 at 9:00pm
Great article! Was that an intentional pun between ‘Let Freedom Rein in Big Tech’ and ‘Let Freedom Reign in Big Tech’. I had to read the article before i realized it wasn’t a typo!
Andrew_FL
Feb 20 2022 at 1:21am
This old canard again?
john hare
Feb 20 2022 at 4:55am
Traditionally. It is fairly recently that people have started trying to apply that to certain corporations.
Andrew_FL
Feb 20 2022 at 9:59am
The most censorious entity in world history is the Church, not the State. Nothing recent about it.
Jon Murphy
Feb 20 2022 at 10:25am
For the longest time, Church and State were one and the same. It’s only fairly recently that the two have separated. Once the Church lost the power of the State, it’s ability to censor virtually disappeared. The Pope can proclaim anything he was as heretical, but it affects me not at all. However, if Washington proclaims something as heretical, it does affect me.
Jon Murphy
Feb 20 2022 at 10:27am
To make my implicit point explicit:
The Church only had the power to censor because of the State. That the Church qua State had censorious power longer than the State qua State is an accident of history, nothing more.
MarkW
Feb 20 2022 at 7:21am
But what about when governments censor indirectly by demanding ‘voluntary’ cooperation in suppressing ideas it does not like? What should the remedy be? This should rightly be considered a first amendment violation, and the Supreme Court might rule that way if a case ever made it to them…someday. But would there be any actual legal (or even political) repercussions for government officials who had engaged in ‘censorship by proxy’?
Remember Operation Choke Point? The banks were all private businesses, free to choose their customers, so the black-listing of various classes of legal business wasn’t a direct government action (just as in with the suppression of ‘disinformation’), and yet it was certainly an egregious abuse nonetheless.
I think we have to face up to the fact that in the current era, indirect censorship via government threats and strong-arming is the problem in need of a solution. I’m not sure anything on the table is the right approach, but we should recognize that what we’ve been seeing actually IS government censorship (albeit by proxy).
Matthias
Feb 26 2022 at 2:41am
Maybe. Though, adding even more government to the mix seems like it would be counterproductive in this case?
Lowering barriers to entry for companies who would defect from the cartel-like behaviour seems useful?
Jon Murphy
Feb 20 2022 at 8:40am
Good stuff (as always).
I think another danger here is mis-identifying the cause of various outcomes. Depending on one’s POV and sources of information, random occurrences could be seen as grounds for regulation. Take, for example, your Google/Bing story. Both Google and Bing use algorithms to determine what results to show based on people’s keywords and the links they click on. More popular links get shown first (as well as those who pay for advertising space). Consequently, if Google users do not frequently click on the video of the Chinese doctor, those results will be pushed further down. To someone who only uses Google, this may look like censorship when, in reality, it is simply how the algorithm is working.
I’ve noticed this behavior a lot recently, especially on social media from folks who have very closed circles. There was an incident maybe about a year ago when a number of books were delisted on Amazon. The books were by prominent classical Liberals (like Thomas Sowell) and various left authors. There was a glitch with the publisher that automatically caused Amazon to delist the books. But what was interesting is the reaction: both the classical Liberal folks on my Facebook feed and the left folks were claiming censorship by Amazon. But they only saw the books they supported delisted because their circles were closed to other POVs. Both sides were calling for regulation; regulation what would not have solved a thing.
MarkW
Feb 20 2022 at 11:11am
Just as a test, I just googled using “jay inslee quote protect from covid”, and the first result was exactly what David was looking for, so if Google was blocking or ‘de-ranking’ those hits, it is no longer doing so. I wonder if his searches still fail to turn up the relevant information?
It’s really unclear to what extent search engine results are wholly automatic. Are results for certain controversial topics hand massaged (with manual overrides, adjusting parameters of the search algorithm, limiting results to ‘respectable’ sources, etc)? Certainly the tech giants do have ‘disinformation’ teams, and they aren’t doing nothing — how exactly do they flag and filter out the ‘bad stuff’?
David Henderson
Feb 20 2022 at 11:25am
Mark W,
That’s really interesting. When I put those words you used in quotation marks, Google tells me “no results found.” When out of quotation marks, Inslee’s interview quote still doesn’t come up.
Either way, my point about competition is still robust. Whether it’s due to someone at Google trying to tilt the results or it’s due to something else, Bing succeeded for me where Google failed. In the future, I’ll use both.
Jon Murphy
Feb 20 2022 at 11:31am
For what it’s worth, I had the same results as MarkW. It’s really odd.
TMC
Feb 21 2022 at 3:56pm
I got one result, this blog post.
Dylan
Feb 21 2022 at 8:56am
A tip on internet search engines, it is good to not solely rely on any one (or even two) for all searches. I primarily use DuckDuckGo (which utilizes Bing) and Startpage (which gets results from Google) as they focus on privacy, which is important to me. However, I still will go directly to Google or Bing from time to time, as well as other specialized search engines to get more granular results. I have keyword shortcuts that let me search close to 20 search engines directly from the browser address bar, everything from the generic searches I mentioned to more specific searches like Wolfram Alpha (great for calculations) or Google Maps (to get directions without having to open up Google Maps first) to stock quotes and dictionary searches. Very helpful and saves me a ton of time.
David Henderson
Feb 21 2022 at 9:32am
Thanks, Dylan.
Jon Murphy
Feb 20 2022 at 11:30am
I doubt it is wholly automatic, but the degree of automation isn’t too vital to my point. My point is that as people self-isolate themselves from opposing views, they will tend to see random events as having a bias simply because they are unaware of an entire subset affected.
Weir
Feb 20 2022 at 5:26pm
Liel Leibovitz wrote about Google’s Perspective API back in 2017: “The idea behind it is simple: because it’s impossible for an online publisher to manually monitor all the comments left on its website, Perspective will use advanced machine learning to help moderators track down comments that are likely to be ‘toxic.’ Here’s how the company describes it: ‘The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation.'”
Machine learning isn’t automatic. The machine is trained by Google employees.
Ken P
Feb 20 2022 at 12:31pm
I think you’re leaving out the role of politicians in this information filtering. Politicians often tweet out specific instructions to big tech and also bring them in to be chastised for not doing enough to stop misinformation. There’s an implicit warning of breakup or other crackdown if they don’t get in line.
I don’t believe Microsoft had to testifying in the misinformation hearings and has generally been on the good side of officials for years.
Weir
Feb 20 2022 at 5:16pm
Google goofs in both directions, whether you’re trying to find a quote or if you have the exact quote already and you want to locate the rest of the page.
That’s what happened to me. I had a quote from Wilfred Reilly. The unlocatable page, as it turns out, was an Unherd article published one or two months before.
The best that Google could come up with: “If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.”
The hard-working curators at Google have a category, accurate but misleading, that guides their thinking when they make these decisions.
Facts can be accurate but misleading if the audience can’t be trusted to remember, on their own, some other facts that are important too. That’s how Google employees are trained, and how their AI is trained by them.
Comments are closed.