Anti BigTech Bills Are Too Good to Be True

I assumed there was something nefarious about these bills and it is confirmed: Anti-Big Tech Legislation Has a Free-Speech Poison Pill

uperficially, Big Tech is one of the only issues where the right and left of America have some degree of unity: Both dislike Big Tech’s sheer power and would prefer to scale it back.

As a result, there is a good chance that two antitrust bills currently under consideration in Congress will actually pass, instead of going nowhere like the vast majority of legislation. One bill recently passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with enough Republican support to be actually bipartisan (as opposed to the fake bipartisanship where two Republicans join a political purge targeted at their own party).

But Americans should not be misled. These two bills are highly flawed, and unless they are improved before passage, instead of fixing the censorship threat of Big Tech they would make it more robust than ever before.

For nationalists, populists, conservatives, and dissidents of all stripes, the single biggest problem with tech is not its size, but how effectively it can exploit chokepoints to shut down dissident speech. In theory, both of these bills could strike a major blow against censorship and in favor of free speech and freedom of association. Yet right now, they are not doing that. Instead, both bills contain loopholes that allow tech giants to keep exercising the same monopoly powers they always have, as long as it is in the name of “safety.” ...Neither loophole actually defines what “safety” is, but the word is already well-established in the tech world as a euphemism for “censorship.” YouTube’s calls its content moderation division YouTube Trust and Safety; Twitter’s moderation advisory group is the Twitter Trust and Safety Council; the World Economic Forum’s initiative to increase digital censorship is titled Advancing Global Digital Content Safety; in the U.K., Boris Johnson’s new bill to combat “disinformation and misinformation” online is called the Online Safety Bill. When Apple banned Parler after January 6, it was to stop “threats to people’s safety.” When Amazon followed behind and kicked Parler off Amazon Web Services, it was because the company “poses a very real risk to public safety.”

If these vague loopholes remain in place, then instead of using Big Tech antitrust to empower dissidents, these bills will give them explicit approval from Congress to continue censorship in the guise of safety.