We should fight Big Tech, but making the Federal Trade Commission its policeman isn’t the way to victory.
We should fight Big Tech, but making the Federal Trade Commission its policeman isn’t the way to victory.
M icrosoft announced this month that Internet Explorer, the way Boomers probably still log onto the World Wide Web, was being taken out back and shot after 27 years. It may be hard to imagine for Millennials and Generation Z, but my fellow Xennials well remember the “browser wars” from around the turn of this century. The lesson that was taught was one of the government staying out of the way of emerging technologies and letting healthy competition and consumer choice sort things out.
Back in the late 1990s, when one bought a personal computer, one also bought an operating system, Windows (much like today). Programs came standard with Windows, such as Word and Excel. A program that also came standard with Windows was Internet Explorer, one of the first HTML browsers. But it wasn’t the only browser out there, nor was it widely considered the best. That honor belonged to Netscape Navigator, the browser all the tech guys used.
Critically, it was very possible to have both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator on the same personal computer. The former came by default in the same way that Word and Excel did. The latter had to be downloaded off an Internet server, or more commonly in the old days uploaded from a boxed disc set one bought at one’s local OfficeMax, Circuit City, or RadioShack.
The Clinton Justice Department believed that bundling together a personal computer with the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Internet Explorer Web browser smelled too much like a monopoly. So in 1998 the Justice Department brought suit in United States v. Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft ultimately won the case in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The result of the case is now so commonsense as to sound mundane, but at the time it was the top of the news at the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. The court found that it was not a monopoly to vertically integrate a computer’s operating system with software that could run on that operating system, including an Internet browser. Indeed, to this very day one of the first things most people do when they buy a personal computer is to open Microsoft Edge (the descendent of Internet Explorer) to download Google Chrome (or another preferred browser), never to use Microsoft Edge ever again (except on the random funky government website). Many people do the same on iOS devices such as iPhones to replace the default Safari browser with the mobile version of Chrome.
The browser wars of my college and young-professional years officially ended with Microsoft’s decision to finally kill off Internet Explorer (may it rest in peace). Netscape Navigator died some time ago and was reconstituted as Mozilla Firefox, another browser you probably once used but forgot all about until now. The history of browsers shows ebbs and flows of dominance. At one point or another, all the browsers took turns being dominant, only to give way to the next gale of creative destruction.
History repeats itself (or does it rhyme?). The Senate this summer is primed to consider S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and boasting a dozen evenly bipartisan co-sponsors. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) wants to hold a vote on S. 2992 “pronto.”
The Congressional Research Service description of the bill says that S. 2992 hogties the biggest of Big Tech companies, which:
may not materially restrict or impede the capacity of a competing business user to access or interoperate with the same platform, operating system, or hardware or software features. The bill also restricts the platform’s use of nonpublic data obtained from or generated on the platform and prohibits the platform from restricting access to platform data generated by the activity of a competing business user. The bill also provides additional restrictions related to installing or uninstalling software, search or ranking functionality, and retaliation for contact with law enforcement regarding actual or potential violations of law.
Does that sound familiar? It should, because it’s exactly the same logic the Clinton administration’s Justice Department used in its case against Microsoft three decades ago: A large company was using its vertical integration and market share to prevent legitimate competition.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act empowers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to go after these platforms with hefty fines. According to the Wall Street Journal, the companies covered here are Amazon (so much for Prime), Google, Apple, Facebook (a possible unintentional windfall beneficiary), Microsoft (ironically), WeChat, and TikTok. Twitter and Walmart may also be caught in the net.
No one would ever confuse my writing with a defense of Big Tech. I’m the same author who praised Governor DeSantis’sactions against Disney as a proxy war against woke capitalism (most of all Big Tech’s role) and said we had to “put a head on a pike.” Earlier this month, I was put in Twitter jail (again) for the high crime of committing truth about politically incorrect topics. I’m all for innovative ways to get these guys to stop censoring conservatives, but rerunning the browser wars and making the FTC the policeman of Big Tech isn’t it. Instead, policy-makers would do well to start with the government benefits these companies are getting in the tax code (federal, state, and local) and through direct fiscal and regulatory subsidies.
Encourage actions such as Elon Musk’s liberation of Twitter from Pajama Boy engineers and their woke paymasters. Put Big Tech on notice that censoring conservatives will come with a price for their bottom line, and they’d be better off with a more neutral content environment.
But conservative goals cannot be achieved by liberal ends such as making the government bigger. S. 2992 has the right targets for sure, but it’s a doomsday weapon that should never be used.