The Consolidation of Bureaucratic Power

Competition, not government regulators, will guarantee free speech

Some Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, made a big mistake by voting for an antitrust bill aimed at Big Tech and pushed by progressive Democrats. Photo: Gage Skidmore

Last month, a curious Left-Right coalition pushed a bill called the American Innovation and Choice Online Act out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a vote of 16-6, with five Republicans—Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, John Kennedy, and Josh Hawley—joining progressive Democrats in supporting a so-called tech competition bill designed to rein in Big Tech.

The bill’s supporters say it would help ensure competition in the increasingly monopolized sector, as well as cast censorship as a potentially anti-trust violation, but what it would actually do is give federal bureaucrats a sweeping new grant of authority, who will use it first to reshape the tech sector to its wishes, whatever they may be, and then extend that power to other sectors of the economy.

Progressive Democrats—the bill is authored by Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota—support the measure because, well, they always like to bestow more power on the federal bureaucracy; that, and they are mad at Big Tech for not censoring conservatives more than they already do. On the other hand, conservatives are simply mad that they are being censored at the behest of Democrats.

This surely makes for strange bedfellows—Republicans going after the companies censoring them by partnering with Democrats who are going after those companies because they aren’t censoring the Republicans enough. This is wrongheaded on so many fronts that it is almost hard to comprehend, but first and foremost, the push today should be to reduce the power and size of the regulatory state, not increase it.

(To be fair, six other Republican senators on the committee did oppose the bill: Mike Lee, John Cornyn, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, Thom Tillis, and Marsha Blackburn.)

Under the bill, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be empowered to file antitrust lawsuits and pursue enforcement actions against covered companies for myriad offenses. For example, covered companies could not self preference their own products on their own platforms. A horrid crime, I know. Google could not give preference to Google maps. Apple would not be able to pre-load its apps on your iPhone. As for Amazon Prime, well, free Prime shipping could come into the crosshairs, and I’m going to be really mad about that. Anyway, you get the picture.

Consumers could lose features and products they like, and prices likely will rise for others. The bottom line is, this legislation will do nothing to protect consumers—the very purpose of anti-trust legislation—and almost certainly harm them. Here’s what an aide to Grassley said to one media outlet:

If we make carveouts for all the pro-consumer features, then the bill will be useless.”

Ah, supporters say, but there’s content moderation protection that will prevent censorship of conservative views.

Well, about that …