the federal government should license any firm that functions in whole or in part as a search engine or general sales platform—but only in return for the firm’s agreement to obey a single set of industrywide rules and standards set by Congress or an executive agency under congressional, presidential, and judicial oversight.
Lind is arguing that we should deal with private monopoly power by using government power. I think that is a bad trade. A basic libertarian instinct that I have is that we should always be skeptical of the idea of using government power as a “solution” to the problem of power exercised in the private sector.
It’s always a mystery to me that people who are concerned about the power of corporations are not concerned about the power of the government. The U.S. government is vastly more powerful than any corporation, and therefore vastly more dangerous.
Isnt it about balance of power? Used to be labor, government and corporations, then labor was knocked down. If not government, what will limit corporate power?
Who will limit government power? The U.S. government was designed to be self-limiting, with power balanced between three competing branches. That isn’t working any more because allegiance is more to the political parties than to the branches of government. (Congress is only protective of its power if the president is in the other party.) So now the only limitation on government is the competition between the two political parties — and that is starting to come apart, too. If the attitude pushed by so many, that the Republicans should have no power because they are all racists or whatever, takes hold then we will be left with only one power center and no limit on it.
Michael Lind’s solution sounds a little creepy.
How about a government mandate there is at least one corner of the internet, fortunately or otherwise, in which there is no censorship?
The reason for this is that Google controls the roads to the National Town Squares, which is now Twitter and Facebook, or smaller town squares.
You cannot get on your soapbox in town square if internet titans do not want you too. You cannot set out some newspaper boxes with your pamphlets.
Yes, there will be kooks, and hate-fests and pornography and unapproved disinformation and so on in the unregulated corner. But at there will be a place not censored.
Believe me, there are things preventing the US from flourishing, and free speech on the Internet is and would not be one of them.
Why is it I can print up pamphlets and say ivermectin works, but I cannot post my sentiments on Youtube?
I agree with Kling on this specific point. I share his wariness for using government power to combat private market power.
However… Jen Psaki admits that the Biden Administration flags content and users for Facebook. That is not strictly private sector power. It’s a collaborative power between tech companies and the Democratic Party of our own government. And as many conversations are done in secret, we don’t know what they are doing.
I’d like to hear Kling’s view on Rubio’s proposal to mandate disclosure of communications between government and tech companies regarding content moderation:
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/7/rubio-introduces-bill-to-require-big-tech-disclosure-of-government-censorship-requests
Private companies and private citizens have rights to privacy. Politicians have privacy in their private lives, but when acting in an official capacity, and potentially coercing private companies to control political discussions, they shouldn’t have any privacy, and all such conversations should be fully disclosed.
“A basic libertarian instinct that I have is that we should always be skeptical of the idea of using government power as a “solution” to the problem of power exercised in the private sector.”
This is especially true when the monopoly power wasn’t government granted in the first place. You could imagine when some industries started with government granted monopolies in telecom and utilities, for example, that it would be necessary to place restrictions on them in exchange for the monopoly protection so that they wouldn’t abuse it. Of course, one could argue the government granted monopolies weren’t needed in the first place, but I’ll take them as a historical given here.
Agreed. To do Lind’s plan you’d need to set up some licensing agency to ensure conditions are being met. These will be staffed with bureaucrats who will have the same left-leaning sensibilities as other bureaucrats.
Is Lind’s proposal for the US or for China’s government? Licensing all search engines and general sales platforms “but only in return for the firm’s agreement to obey…rules and standards set by…[government]…under [government] oversight” seems like something the CCP would do.
Why does it rarely seem to occur to people who want to regulate tech to relax IP protections for their proprietary software? If I thought Google were that dangerous, before I would even consider heavy-handed regulation, my first thought would be to increase competition by relaxing IP law that gives them a monopoly on much what makes them so good at what they do.
I like this idea. Especially if it could be targeted at specific sectors. If it is IP that is creating the “moats” around consumer tech, then just cancel the IP.
–“A basic libertarian instinct that I have is that we should always be skeptical of the idea of using government power as a “solution” to the problem of power exercised in the private sector.”–
This raises an important question:
What is a private sector solution to private sector power?
Freedom of speech is an important American value, but it has largely been lost in the private sector. I cannot speak my political opinions freely while at work. I’d worry that I would lose my job if I said ‘I believe that a man cannot become a woman by feeling he is one or through surgical methods’ if the topic of transgenderism came up at work.
I am afraid to share my views online using my real name, and in any case if I became successful I would probably be banned by Facebook and Twitter, companies which represent the modern public square.
How can these problems be remedied through the private sector? If everyone who agreed with me spoke up, it would be fine, because my company can fire me, but it can’t fire 40% of its employee base. Yet the most likely course of action if I spoke up is that I would be alone and would face the consequences. These problems seem to be collective action problems, to which government action is ideally suited. We already live in a post civil rights act world. Political viewpoint should be a protected class. What’s the alternative libertarian solution?
When looking for control rods for the woke nuclear core, either:
1. Stop worrying and learn to love meltdown,
2. State-channel control rods, or
3. Private-channel control rods
What you get from a lot of commentators is “1 is really bad, I wish we had some control rods” and “2 is really bad, for reasons”, and sometimes “3 might also be really bad, because polarization, ‘populism’, tribalization, and segregation into bubbles and the looming threat of social decoherence and perpetual low-level civil strife.” The private channel that has any chance of coming into existence – let alone actually working – is not “build your own X” but “balance of terror” and “rival boycotts / cancellations” and the mainstreaming of negative-sum prison-gang politics. To put it another way, a lot of libertarians imagine the ‘private channel’ to be one that is mostly benign, constructive and unobjectionable. Instead, it can turn out to be really horrible, and the argument that one needs to make to be rigorous is to show that the expected value of such possibilities are still better than using the state to tamp down some of these flames.
I’ve got to say I have kind of given up in despair in terms of looking for a fleshed-out argument for these views which are almost always expressed as mere naked assertions and statements of opinion. A simple and persuasive “it would be worse than the path we are on, and we know this because … ” would be an improvement. For example, I think one could argue that one would have to rely on the bureaucracies or courts to enforce such rules fairly, but that most judges can’t be trusted to do it. There are good counterarguments to that – e.g., companies can’t afford to go to court a million times even if the judges would let them win – but at least it’s an argument, not just a dismissal.
I have more respect for the paleolibertarians out there who once upon a time were willing to acknowledge that these sorts of views implied the repeal of the Civil Rights Act and all related anti-discrimination law. What most modern libertarians have done is to swallow the ‘elite class social cartel’ basis of defending this kind of intervening state action, but if one accepts that argument then other interventions in the name of anti-discrimination for exercise of civil rights of free expression are comparably compelling.
Instead we get a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the current system protecting the coalition of clients of the progressive voting blocks, but an insistence that it can never extend to anyone else. This is ‘principled’ in the sense of the principle being to give the woke progressives what they want, i.e., the ‘woke meltdown’ scenario we are now enjoying living through.
Great comment.
What’s worse is that some of the private actions you mentioned aren’t really workable due to corporate power and monopoly/oligopoly.
If you don’t want to support the woke farmer down the road, you can buy your corn from someone else, but if Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon are all woke, what are you going to do? You could decide to use a flip phone and stay out of the modern online public square, but most people aren’t going to suffer returning to life as it was during 2001 so that woke corporations lose 0.00001% of their profits. Boycotts are generally worthless: in a polarized world, if team A boycotts a company, team B will be more likely to support it. Despite drawing the ire of the woke, Chik Fil A didn’t seem to experience any serious financial woes as a result. The only way a boycott could ever have a serious impact is if team A was successful in getting most or all of its members to participate, and that’s never going to happen.
Cancelation is likewise difficult when the other team controls the mass media, government bureaucracies and HR departments. Has anyone in the last year or two been successfully canceled after exhibiting blatant anti-white racism in public? I’ve seen people who’ve done such things promoted, but never anyone fired (or for that matter, even reprimanded).
By contrast, it seems possible to be able to produce results via the voting booth. After all, if Trump can be elected President, for all intents and purposes anyone can.
I would agree that the critics of the Civil Rights movement have been vindicated by history. However, Civil Rights isn’t going away, but it can be amended such that political viewpoint becomes a protected class. The willingness to do so is the bare minimum of what I would expect from a politician who wants my vote.
It can get a whole lot worse than rival boycotts, which is what most libertarians are missing in their fixation on the state. If the state does not maintain a monopoly on the whole large spectrum of coercion, then it leaks that coercive power into the private sector, and an ideology that is supposed to be anti-coercion and not just anti-state should not wear blinders to fail to look elsewhere for where it might be operating.
But lets stick to boycotts for the purpose of discussion. There is a whole extensive literature on boycotts for which a distillation could be that most of the time they don’t work because there are a lot of things which can go wrong in many-iterations coordination problems, but that in some special cases they do work, and when they do, they can be terrifyingly effective. You hear a lot of people just blithely repeat a mantra, “Boycotts don’t / can’t ever work”, but that’s not true.
And the important sociological question is under what conditions do they work, and the political question is how to arrange and sustain those conditions in order to exercise the extra-legal coercive power that is one’s undeniable aim, even if one perceives it as a defensive, countervailing, counter-coercive exercise of power, in a kind of horrible social-gangs-MAD scenario that, we can only conclude, many libertarians prefer to using formal processes of representation and deliberation to coming to negotiated settlements for social peace, i.e., state politics.
The simple name for those conditions is ‘solidarity’, and one needs certain cultural context and foundations but also social, mechanical, and digital technologies to create and sustain that kind of solidarity, which at root involves the carrots and sticks of rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors. Prison gangs and criminal organizations know all about how to do this with violence, which is easy, but doing it without violence and by staying within the law is trickier. Unions were the classic example of solidarity movements which ‘boycott’ their organizations with strikes – by collectively and simultaneously refusing to sell them labor, thus applying coercive pressure to give in to their demands.
In theory a political party is supposed to be the mechanism by which a large block of similarly situated people with common interests manifest political solidarity and collectively exercise power in order to prevent their getting steamrolled over by other population groups. Buy obviously the Republican party in its current form is utterly useless for this purpose, and of course a lot of the anti-woke crowd is very squeamish or put off by the very idea of using politics to stop the meltdown by whatever means necessary. See, e.g., the hysteria and cloud of constant lying surrounding coverage of Orban and Hungary – a country no one would pay any attention to whatsoever if it didn’t represent some tiny isolated example of someone, somewhere being aware of the true nature of the problem and displaying any willingness whatsoever to deploy state authority to thwart it.
While it’s probably unlikely, it is nevertheless naive to imagine that it is *impossible* for some group to figure out the right technological stack to generate and maintain precisely the kind of political solidarity necessary to substitute for the GOP and counter-threaten the agents of woke excesses with social and economic annihilation.
Were that to come about, it might solve one problem, but just replace it with another, which is the “tense ceasefire of a powderrkeg waiting to explode at any moment”, which is what you see in some countries already, and is of course the perpetual, palpable tension between members of rival gangs.
But, you know, apparently, that is still totally preferable to a common-carrier law for social media companies or something, which would be so much worse, because reasons.
I could support a common-carrier law for social media, just as I support similar laws for public transit, phones, and the Post Office. Or why I can support most antitrust laws.
What I could not support is what BC above describes as “Licensing all search engines and general sales platforms ‘but only in return for the firm’s agreement to obey…rules and standards set by…[government]…under [government] oversight’.” Out of the frying pan into the fire.
If it’s strictly private sector power, the status quo market solutions are adequate. What we are seeing in 2021 is private sector power influenced by a heavy hand of government power.
Richard Hanania’s post gives an excellent explanation with tangible evidence that the US government threatens and intimidates US companies far to the left: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Coinbase is trying to be politically neutral and us under coordinated legal pressure and harassment for doing so.
Dollar General is fined $6 million for doing simple criminal background checks. The business people at Dollar General are threatened with more and punished with a legal process. This strikes fear into them to veer hard to the left. Fear works.
The US Government legal system is intimidating American business and forcing them far to the left. A reasonable solution is just fix that. Free American Companies from this type of fear.
So in other words, there is no private solution. We need to elect aggressive people into power at all levels of government who will act as a countervailing force. As Handle mentions, we cannot count on traditional Republicans for this. All Romney-style Republicans should be removed through primaries.
It is a key issue for more thoughtful Republicans to support Rep challenges to half-Dem elected GOPe.
All of whom, including Liz Cheney, are better than a Dem – but Reps would be better off with more conservative Reps willing to fight to conserve Free Speech against the America haters.
We need a good Digital Utilities Commission, to politically decide on the public good and how to regulate.
We’re unlikely to get such a good one as we need, but likely to get more towards accepting all speech that doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Any digital platform getting Sec. 231 protection from lawsuits should only censor speech it deems would violate the First Amendment, and be willing to go to court to assert that. The First Amendment is the American digital community standard we need.
Higher taxes on advertising would help.
Republicans being more willing to agree to another set of internet tools would help, but seems unlikely.
Brave instead of Chrome? Why not Opera, or …
Rumble instead of YouTube? DDG instead of Google?
OANN instead of CNN?
Too many other choices, all small (or very very small) potatoes as compared to the market dominant.
Anti-trust could be stopping the current giants from buying any more companies – which would help some smaller groups to combine, but with less big payouts for the founders and Angel Investors.
Enforcing voter IDs is also clearly necessary, but not to be talked about in any PC woke kinda crowd.