GOP Stops Pretending It Ever Actually Cared About ‘Antitrust Reform’

Policy

from the dysfunction-junction dept

To be clear: despite a lot of media coverage claiming otherwise, the GOP (and much of the DNC) was never actually serious about antitrust reform. The GOP in particular has a forty year track record of supporting unchecked monopolization and consolidation with no meaningful government oversight across virtually every industry (telecom, banking, energy, and transportation in particular).

Yet somehow, during the debate over Section 230 and whether or not social media should moderate political propaganda and hate speech, the party positioned itself as being “serious about antitrust reform.” This was, of course, a ruse: the GOP was largely just seeking leverage to frighten Silicon Valley away from moderating race-baiting propaganda, a cornerstone of modern GOP power.

Now, the GOP is backing further away from its brief flirtation with pretending to actually care about antitrust reform and market consolidation after Congressional legislative efforts fell flat on their face:

The House Judiciary Committee on Friday announced Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, a rigid libertarian, will serve as the head of the antitrust subcommittee. The appointment was a snub to Colorado Republican Ken Buck, one of the main House GOP critics of big tech companies, who was the panel’s ranking member in the last Congress. 

To be clear, despite the press narrative to the contrary, I don’t think either party is particularly serious about antitrust reform. Congress is simply too grotesquely corrupt, and the combined cross-industry lobbying opposition to meaningful reform too great, to currently be overcome without some sort of major policy and cultural trajectory shift and a massive upheaval in Congress.

Some key Democrats, like Katie Porter and Lina Khan, do at least actually care about the issue. Some key Republicans, like Ken Buck, kind of care, but are so mired in bigoted partisan fever dreams (see his threat to use antitrust to punish “woke Apple” or his tendency to shoot his own legislation in the ass) he’s effectively useless as any kind of serious reformer.

Thanks to Congressional corruption, the biggest push we’ve seen for meaningful antitrust reform in years came in the form of a small number of extremely narrow and problematic bills that myopically fixated only on Big Tech, and even then only specifically massive companies with huge market caps. And even that failed to gain passage, seeing uniformly broad opposition from the same GOP that spent the last three years pretending to care so much about antitrust reform.

The GOP’s pretense that it was “serious about antitrust reform now” was parroted repeatedly and often by the press over the last few years, garnering unearned praise from everyone from Glenn Greenwald and Matt Stoller to mainstream political coverage across Axios, Politico, and Semafor.

It was always bullshit. The GOP was simply angry that a handful of California companies had begun belatedly and sloppily moderating right wing propaganda and hate speech on the Internet, cornerstones of modern GOP party power in the face of unfavorably shifting demographics. The antitrust reform push was a hollow gambit to scare them away from such behaviors, and it served its purpose.

The GOP, of course, won’t stop whining ceaselessly about being “censored” (read: not being able to spread bigotry, hate, and propaganda unchecked across the Internet), but the use of “antitrust reform” as flimsy cover is apparently going away, supplanted by more generic whining about how you can’t make fun of minorities any more like you used to be able to on the Internet:

The appointment of Massie, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained inventor who has filed dozens of patents, signals that the Judiciary Committee under Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio will shift its focus away from legislation aimed at curbing the power of the largest tech companies. Jordan has been more focused on free-speech issues, including big tech’s perceived liberal bias.

“We’re all united in wanting to stop the censorship of conservatives and the suppression of free speech,” Jordan said in an interview. “That’s going to be a focus of the full committee work.”

As a reporter who watched the GOP coddle telecom monopolies for the last twenty-three years, pretending that a party specifically dedicated to unchecked corporate power and consolidation was going to “rein in unchecked corporate power” and “protect consumers from Big Tech” was always the pinnacle of willful delusion.

The press, as they often do, portrayed the GOP as being “serious about antitrust reform” because they’re fecklessly terrified of offending sources, advertisers, and event sponsors. They’ll continue to let the GOP pretend it’s being unfairly censored on the Internet (something completely deflated by science and factual data) for the exact same reason.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, big tech, censorship, consolidation, content moderation, corporate power, gop, ken buck, monopoly, propaganda, thomas massie