Antitrust should be used to break up partisan tech giants like Facebook, Google
Antitrust should be used to break up partisan tech giants
like Facebook, Google
BY SELWYN DUKE, CONTRIBUTOR - 12/27/16 12:40 PM EST 464
How much face time will your news story get on Facebook?
How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined
not by whether the story is "fake" news or newsworthy, but by whether
it's politically correct. And it's time to break up the Internet's left-wing,
information-conduit oligopoly.
If "knowledge is power" and "The pen is
mightier than the sword," entities controlling what pens you see are
powerful indeed. Facebook and Google "account for 75% of all the referrals
major news and entertainment sites now receive," according to a Politico
report in July.
Facebook boasts a 40 percent share of the social media
market and 1.5 billion users worldwide, making this Internet "nation"
more populous than any country on Earth.
Upwards of 40 percent of American adults get news from the site.
Google accounts for 64 percent of all U.S. desktop search
queries. In Europe, the figure is a whopping 90 percent. The company also owns
YouTube, the world's most popular video-sharing website.
How is this power used? Earlier this year, ex-Facebook
employees admitted they routinely suppressed conservative news and were ordered
to place relatively unpopular but company-favored (read: liberal) stories in
their "trending" news section. And trending means mind-bending
because people are influenced by what's "popular." Make an article
appear more or less so and you can cause some readers to embrace it as
"consensus" or dismiss it as a fringe view. It snowballs, too:
prominent placement makes a piece more popular, which makes it more prominent,
which makes it yet more popular, which makes it...well, you get the idea.
Now the social-media site - dubbed "Fakebook"
by many - states it will label and essentially bury "fake news,"
using as fact-checkers liberal outlets such as Snopes.com, Politifact and ABC,
which themselves have peddled falsehoods (see here, here and here).
And Google? In its June piece "The New
Censorship," U.S. News and World Report lists nine blacklists Google
maintains. The site asks, "How did Google become the internet's censor and
master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?" Moreover, the
search giant announced last year that it was considering ranking sites not just
based on popularity (which reflects the market), but on
"truthfulness" - as determined, of course, by Google's
Democrat-donating techies.
Blacklisting can be devastating, too, as what befell two
normal businesses illustrates. As U.S. News also reported, "Heading into
the holiday season in late 2013, an online handbag business suffered a 50
percent drop in business because of blacklisting. In 2009, it took an eco-friendly
pest control company 60 days to leap the hurdles required to remove Google's
warnings, long enough to nearly go broke."
Likewise, stigmatize a media website with blacklisting
or, more deviously, by burying its result on the eighth search page (Web users
generally examine only the first few pages), and you could dry up its revenue -
and readership. Thus, this tactic sends politically incorrect views to Internet
Siberia, where few will hear the dissenters except their fellow Google-gulag
inmates.
One victim was combative PC Magazine columnist John
Dvorak, whose website and podcast site were blacklisted in 2013. This prompted
him to ask, "When Did Google Become the Internet Police?" Answer: a
long time before. In 2006, the company terminated its news relationship with
some conservative news sites critical of Islam.
So is it time to break up Facebook and Google? In
principle, I may object to such things. But here's the issue: if antitrust laws
are unjust, eliminate them. But if we're going to have them, they should be
applied where most needed. As for Google, most people admits it's "a de
facto monopoly."
Libertarian tech investor Peter Thiel and ex-Microsoft
CEO Steve Ballmer both think so, and even "Google chairman Eric Schmidt
has admitted "we're in that area."
The breakup of AT&T's Bell System was mandated in
1982. That came even without Bell denying service to people, blocking their
calls or hiding their phone numbers based on the content of their
conversations. The Internet and social media may be more like a party line, but
that doesn't mean they should reflect only the Democrat Party line.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) is a conservative media
personality whose work has been published on The American Conservative,
WorldNetDaily, and American Thinker. He has also contributed to college
textbooks published by Gale - Cengage Learning, and is a frequent guest on
radio and television.
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