Topics: tech hearings, antitrust, “anti-competition,” censorship, Google and China, China broadly, a dash of TikTok, and the New York Times

Raise your right hand. Last week our congressmen activated the mysterious congressional power of summoning whoever they want before a panel of angry swamp creatures and publicly attacking them for six hours:

Their target was “Big Tech” — Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. Their purpose? Ostensibly to figure out whether these companies are in violation of United States antitrust laws. If not (they’re not), should we amend them? (we should not)

But of course no one really came to learn.

Congressmen from both parties came to the hearings to test arguments in advance of an important national election, and to see what might play well with their respective bases. For Republicans that meant arguments were all variations on “Big Tech is censoring you” and “Big Tech loves China.” For Democrats, it meant “the concept of business is just kind of evil, let’s dismantle it.”

Conspicuously absent from the hearings were almost any questions about consumers, which would presumably be important were the welfare of consumers — U.S. citizens, represented by the U.S. congressmen holding this hearing — actually a concern. Democrats were rather principally concerned with the fact that Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple were doing too well. Almost without exception they focused on “anti-competition,” a euphemism here for “winning,” which we are meant to believe, in this strange age, a kind of almost-crime. Congressman Nadler repeatedly implied Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, which was widely panned by tech press at the time as ridiculous, and spectacularly overpriced at 1 billion dollars, was in some way insidious. He implied Mark knew Facebook would dominate photo-sharing if he acquired Instagram. How this was anything other than a compliment of the CEO’s leadership was left to the public’s imagination. The congressmen moved on. Amazon was attacked for cloning competing products. Google was attacked for being better than Yelp. In another round of questioning, Congressman Nadler invoked a drama between Apple and DHH, a Danish programmer popular on Twitter for making fun of American tech executives. Nadler lamented the fact that this paragon of essential American values was recently required to pay money to Apple for selling his product on Apple’s store. Today, DHH is arguing for the total expulsion of American tech companies from Europe.

You might be wondering why questions pertaining to the very specific concerns of a Danish citizen in broad contempt of American business should be of so great a concern to our congressmen at a national hearing on the welfare of U.S. citizens. Me too! But I’m going to take a risk here and admit I mostly found it funny. Nadler and DHH teaming up to dismantle American industry is just too perfectly on brand for both of them.

While Democrats hammered the notion business was itself a kind of dirty thing, regardless of consumer satisfaction with the tech industry, Republican congressmen focused mostly on Big Tech’s censorship of conservatives. Tech journalists almost uniformly mocked the notion, insisting no such censorship exists — in fact social media is biased in favor of conservatives, they said — and cited the New York Times’ Kevin Roose’s committed, breathless reporting on the fact that the most popular articles on Facebook are not from the New York Times. Censorship of conservatives is simply not real, tech journalists say, while penning their congratulations to Jack Dorsey for censoring the president of the United States, and insisting he do more.

In the spirit of tech journalism’s long-standing commitment to pretending political bias does not exist in the technology industry while at the same time congratulating every instance of it, there was one, lonely defense of Mark Zuckerberg. It came from Nilay Patel, Editor-in-chief of the Verge. Why? Because Zuckerberg allegedly fired Palmer Luckey for political reasons. Which is…

*checks notes*

Totally fine.

Such behavior from the tech press isn’t unusual, but in this case it is ironic. Meaningful censorship of the American public that can’t be avoided would in fact constitute consumer harm. In this way, the censorship argument — and let’s just table the merits for a moment — was the only legitimate antitrust critique of the day. If one were serious about dismantling the technology industry, and the tech press presumably is, this would absolutely be the path.

As winning competitions isn’t “anti-competitive,” and is also not illegal, most arguments against the tech industry fell on deaf, public ears. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple all traded slightly up the day of the hearings, and exploded after earnings the following day.

The media take? I mean, it’s always just… so good.

Four companies in open competition with each other are each without competition because… they’re making money? I legitimately can’t follow the logic, here, but it’s worth noting these companies are each doing as well as they are because they’ve proven themselves indispensable throughout the pandemic that crippled our country — a pandemic that by the way both government AND media got wrong.

“No handshakes, please!”

But credit where credit is due, there is at least one company the tech press has gone out of its way to defend this week. It just happens to be controlled by a brutal, authoritarian government.

TikTok block party. TikTok is of course hopelessly compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, a government best known for such recent hits as “enslaving the people of Hong Kong” and “doing literal genocide.” Such luminaries in tech journalism as Kara Swisher would therefore like to remind you… Facebook is the real problem, here.

It’s unfortunate Kara feels such apparent pressure to defend China, because were she willing to simply critique actual authoritarianism she would have more than ample ground to critique American companies by extension, which is a job that by all evidence seems to make her happy. And I want her to be happy! In one rather surreal moment at last week’s hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted “we have very limited presence in China.” There was the soft implication this was some kind of choice, and there was no follow-up. Flashback: Google built the CCP a fucking censorship engine. The company has clearly moderated its approach to China, but it would be nice to hear why.

In an excellent 2018 MIT Technology Review piece recounting the history of Google and China, something struck me as worth revisiting —

When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu.

Removing content with no sticky, public notification on the matter is an especially effective form of censorship in which one does not even realize he is being censored. But while Google no longer operates in China, Chinese-style censorship, in the form of delisting politically forbidden content that sort of just vanishes, seems increasingly to exist in our country today.

Tech companies are large, and powerful, and absolutely not above criticism. But why are we focusing so relentlessly on user data as applied to generating Facebook ads for upstart direct-to-consumer bathing suit brands? Then, if there is a legitimate privacy concern as related to the data, is it not a sort of… far bigger deal when that data is controlled by a country currently — TODAY — using it to track down members of an ethnic minority and place them in concentration camps? I can’t force you to care about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, or the people of Hong Kong. But I would venture so far as to ask you why on earth you would trust a government committed to atrocities so heinous with the private information of your friends and family. And we should all be asking questions of companies here at home working closely with such governments.

I’ve never been opposed to reasonable critique of the technology industry. I just don’t understand why it so often looks like contempt for success and the welfare of our country.

-SOLANA