Columbia Standard (Commentary)
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by Robert H. Bork, Jr. | published July 29, 2022

This bill, sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would give the Federal Trade Commission expansive powers to regulate large social media companies. Endorsing a vast expansion in government is strange for a conservative. But it is easy to see how Sen. Graham got there. Like millions of Americans, Graham finds that Big Tech’s “efforts to censor conservative content are offensive.” 

Graham, like other conservatives, is so angry about censorship that he is ready to stick it to Big Tech by voting for the Klobuchar bill.

The text of the Klobuchar bill, however, doesn’t touch content moderation. By the admission of Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), Trump impeachment manager and the author of the companion bill in the House, this legislation will not touch “content-moderation practices online.” 

If Graham and his fellow Republicans vote for this bill out of spite, they will enable a government power-grab inimical to conservatism. 

Klobuchar’s bill is a power grab because it would subject businesses to “death-penalty fines” of 15 percent of revenues for crossing poorly defined red lines. According to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), the bill “includes language that could catch up a lot of other firms that are nothing like these [social-media] companies . . . potentially treating Kroger, or Piggly Wiggly, or Home Depot with the same kind of antitrust restrictions that we expect on Facebook, Apple, or Google.”

This bill would create so many new mechanisms for government control of business that C-Suite wokeness and ideological intolerance could easily be enforced by Biden’s hyper-aggressive regulators. Far from breaking up Big Tech, the Klobuchar bill would be a shotgun wedding between Big Business and Big Government.

Another Senate Judiciary Republican, Mike Lee (R-UT), said the Klobuchar bill “may actually entrench the very four companies at which it’s aimed, by creating a strong incentive to simply cease doing any business with third parties.” This could happen because Klobuchar’s legislation would force Big Tech companies that do business with third parties, such as Amazon’s marketplace for small sellers, to share access to their operating, hardware, and software systems. “This could crush thousands of small businesses,” Lee added. 

Klobuchar’s bill would also make it illegal to restrict or impede a business user from accessing data on the platform. The practical effect of this data portability would be to force everything Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants know about American consumers to share with thousands of other companies, some of them foreign.

Where might all that data go? Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) notes that Chinese law obligates companies doing business in China to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services. Alarmed by this critique, Sen. Klobuchar amended her bill to exclude sharing of Americans’ data with China or any other “foreign adversary.” Once Americans’ data is shared by thousands of companies in the digital wild, however, how realistic is it to believe that China will not gain access to it?
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It is understandable why conservatives want to lash out at Big Tech censorship. But too many conservatives in Congress have let their anger get the better of them. Conservatives voting for the radical expansion of Big Government and the entrenchment of Big Tech would be the ultimate “own goal” – a self-defeat from which conservativism and the free market may never recover.

ROBERT H. BORK JR. is the president of the Antitrust Education Project

Baton Rouge Reporter (Commentary)
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by Robert H. Bork, Jr. | published July 29, 2022

Kennedy has been no less colorful in complaining about the size and power of Big Tech. Like many conservatives, he is righteously angry about the content moderation decisions made by big social media companies that always seem to go against conservative speech. He has expressed concern that these companies have become “countries” that are “killing fields for the truth.” It is out of fear of censorship that he joined with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) on June 16 to introduce the BIAS Act, which would restrict search engine algorithms that treat emails from political emails as spam.

Given Sen. Kennedy’s displeasure with Big Tech, it is perhaps no surprise that he joined with four Republican colleagues in the Senate Judiciary Committee in January to pass the Innovation and Choice Online Act – legislation that purports to reign in Big Tech. Kennedy might have done so in part to stay in the good graces of a committee colleague and sponsor of the bill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (D-MN). If he continues his support now, Kennedy could lead enough Republicans to help the bill clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle and send it to President Biden’s desk for signature. But John Kennedy, who has argued that social media needs to simplify the “fine print” on its data policies, might want to take a moment to scrutinize the fine print on this bill. 

The text of the Klobuchar bill won’t “break up” Big Tech or turn off the social media censorship machine. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), Trump impeachment manager and author of the companion bill in the House, admits this legislation will not touch “content-moderation practices online.” But the Klobuchar bill would give the Federal Trade Commission expansive powers to regulate large tech and social media companies. 

Kennedy, who expressed skepticism about Klobuchar’s bill before voting for it in committee, should see that her bill for the government power grab it is. It would subject businesses to “death-penalty fines” of 15 percent of revenues for what seem to be intentionally vague infractions. If Big Tech is put under such a degree of control, it will amount to a shotgun wedding between Big Government and Big Tech. The result would be not the current “countries” of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, but a giant continent fused with Washington, D.C. 

The power grab could soon include much of the rest of the business community. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) said the bill “includes language that could catch up a lot of other firms that are nothing like these [social-media] companies . . . potentially treating Kroger, or Piggly Wiggly, or Home Depot with the same kind of antitrust restrictions that we expect on Facebook, Apple, or Google.”

Worse, this bill would create so many new mechanisms for government control of business that C-Suite wokeness and ideological intolerance could easily be enforced by Biden’s hyper-aggressive regulators. Another Senate Judiciary Republican, Mike Lee (R-UT), said the Klobuchar bill “may actually entrench the very four companies at which it’s aimed.” This could happen because Klobuchar’s legislation would force Big Tech companies that do business with third parties, such as Amazon’s marketplace for small sellers, to deny access to their operating, hardware, and software systems. “This could crush thousands of small businesses,” Lee added. 

Klobuchar’s bill would also make it illegal to restrict or impede a business user from accessing data on the platform. The practical effect of this data portability would be to force everything Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants know about American consumers to share with thousands of other companies, some of them foreign.

Where might all that data go? Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) notes that a 2017 Chinese law obligates companies doing business in China to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services. Alarmed by this critique, Sen. Klobuchar amended her bill to exclude sharing of Americans’ data with China or any other “foreign adversary.” Once Americans’ data is shared by thousands of companies in the digital wild, however, how realistic is it to believe that China will not gain access to it?

It is understandable why conservatives want to lash out at Big Tech censorship. It makes no sense, however, for a senator as conservative as John Kennedy to vote for a bill that would incentivize more censorship for conservatives, marry Big Tech to Big Government, and ship off our data to China.

ROBERT H. BORK JR. is the president of the Antitrust Education Project

Washington D.C. Business Daily (Op-Ed)
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by Robert H. Bork, Jr. | published July 6, 2022

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In January, Senator Ted Cruz joined four Republican colleagues to pass Democrat Amy Klobuchar’s Innovation and Choice Online Act out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The word on Capitol Hill is that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has now promised Klobuchar that her antitrust bill, which takes aim at Big Tech, will get a floor vote later this month.

If Cruz maintains his support for Klobuchar’s bill, he could potentially bring enough like-minded Republicans with him to send this progressive dream to President Biden’s desk.

Why would a conservative Texas Republican support progressive antitrust legislation? Simply put, Ted Cruz is mad enough to swing a wrecking ball at Silicon Valley.

Shortly before voting to move Klobuchar’s bill out of committee, Senator Cruz said the “pervasive” censorship of conservatives by Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media platforms “is malicious, and it is brazen. And Silicon Valley keeps getting worse and worse because no matter how egregious they get with censorship, they’ve discovered there are seemingly no limits and very few downsides to engaging in their self-declared role as the arbiters of what is allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said.”

Cruz candidly admitted that the bill he was voting to move along would not address Big Tech censorship. But with an amendment from the Texas senator, it could become a vehicle for conservatives’ emotional satisfaction. “It is usually my Democratic colleagues who are proposing private rights of action, and it is usually Republicans who are expressing concerns about additional litigation,” Cruz said. “I will say from my perspective the abuses of Big Tech are so egregious that I am more than happy to unleash the trial lawyers.”

If Cruz follows through on his anger, he will be playing the gullible Wile E. Coyote to Klobuchar’s Road Runner. Klobuchar’s bill would subject American businesses to a degree of centralized control that would amount to socialism. It would institutionalize corporate “wokeness” and censorship. And it could expose the private data of millions of Americans to the Chinese Communist regime.

Does this sound over the top? Consider: Klobuchar’s bill would subject a growing number of businesses to “death-penalty fines” of 15 percent of revenues for violating vague, poorly defined redlines. According to Senator Tom Cotton, the bill “includes language that could catch up a lot of other firms that are nothing like these [social-media] companies . . . potentially treating Kroger, or Piggly Wiggly, or Home Depot with the same kind of antitrust restrictions that we expect on Facebook, Apple, or Google.”

This bill would give progressive regulators infinite excuses to target a company or an executive at will. It would create so many new mechanisms for government control of business that C-Suite wokeness and ideological intolerance could easily be enforced by Biden’s hyper-aggressive Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan.

Ironically, if Cruz, angered over censorship, enables the Klobuchar bill to become law, the result will be the worsening of Big Tech’s content-moderation discrimination, which already sometimes amounts to outright censorship of conservative views.

Klobuchar’s legislation would also force Big Tech companies that do business with third parties, such as Amazon’s marketplace for small sellers, to share access to their operating, hardware, and software systems with other companies. “Quite perversely,” said another Senate Republican, Mike Lee of Utah, the bill “may actually entrench the very four companies at which it’s aimed, by creating a strong incentive to simply cease doing any business with third parties.”

“This could crush thousands of small businesses,” Lee added. “It could actually worsen the state of competition in online markets.”

Worse, Klobuchar’s bill would make it illegal to restrict or impede a business user from accessing data on the platform. The practical effect of this data portability would be to force Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants to share everything they know about American consumers with thousands of other companies, some of them foreign.

Where might all that data go? Cruz’s fellow Texas Republican, Senator John Cornyn, pointed to 2020 guidelines from Beijing that remind private Chinese companies that they serve the state. He also noted that a 2017 Chinese law obligates companies doing business in China to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services.

Alarmed by this critique, Senator Klobuchar amended her bill to exclude sharing of Americans’ data with China or any other “foreign adversary.” Once Americans’ data is shared by thousands of companies in the digital wild, however, how realistic is it to believe that China will not gain access to it?

It is understandable that conservatives want to lash out at Big Tech censorship. But too many conservatives in Congress have let their anger get the better of them. Senator Cruz and others have only days to change course before they permanently alter the landscape of American antitrust law and do real harm to every American who uses social media.

​ROBERT H. BORK JR. is the president of the Antitrust Education Alliance.

RealClearPolitics (Commentary)
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by Robert H. Bork, Jr. | published June 09, 2022

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised Sen. Amy Klobuchar that her “Innovation and Choice Online Act” will soon get a floor vote. If enacted, it will subject American business to a degree of centralized control that will amount to socialism. There is no mystery as to why progressive Democrats are lined up behind this bill.

The real question is why Republicans, stalwart conservatives all, might join them to take it over the line.

This is a real possibility because Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Chuck Grassley, Josh Hawley, and John Kennedy are in a state of red-hot fury against big social media companies. They have good reason to be hopping mad. Conservative speech, the bland as well as the provocative, is apt to run afoul of the content moderators of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech platforms. When the owners of the main venues of the national conversation pull a post, a conservative has been censored. When they deplatform, a conservative organization has been put out of business.

So, it is understandable why conservatives would want to kick Big Tech in a soft place. What is not understandable is why some conservatives are considering a measure that would, if anything, provide incentives to make content moderation even more “woke.” This would be just one of the many disastrous consequences of passing Klobuchar’s Pandora’s Box of a bill, which these five Republicans voted to advance out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Let me count the disasters.

First, Klobuchar’s legislation would degrade America’s remaining technological edge by forcing social media companies to be fully interoperable with competitors. By making it illegal for these companies to deny competitors access to their operating, hardware, and software systems, it would force the giving away of some of America’s most precious intellectual property to foreign competition.

Second, Klobuchar’s bill would make it illegal to restrict or impede a business user from accessing data on the platform. This is data portability, an idea with considerable surface appeal. But its practical effect would mean that everything Facebook or Amazon knows about you would have to be shared with other companies. With so many shell companies and corporate alliances, your data could easily go to companies under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party.

Third, the Klobuchar bill would restrict the ability of tech companies to “self-preference,” forcing them to offer competitors equal access to their marketplaces. The practical effect would be to turn America’s most innovative companies into public utilities, destroying hundreds of billions of dollars in equity that American retirees and retirement funds are heavily invested in. Consumers would suffer as well. Amazon could no longer offer discounts on its Prime service. Google Maps would no longer appear at the top of a search. Choices would narrow, likely driving even more inflation.

Some conservatives would go even further, extending heavy-handed antitrust regulation to all business. Sen. Josh Hawley would outlaw all mergers and acquisitions for large companies of all sorts, in effect fossilizing capitalism. In the House, Rep. Ken Buck has recently promised to consider adding regulations to pharmaceuticals, airlines, and banks. Hawley and Buck seem oblivious to a recent study by the respected economics consulting firm NERA, which shows that by widely-used economic measurements, business concentration has been declining, not increasing.

Fourth and worst for conservatives, the Klobuchar bill – which does not even address content moderation – would institutionalize corporate wokeness. This would be the natural result of legislation that would subject a growing number of businesses – by no means limited only to Big Tech – to death-penalty fines of 15-30% of revenues for violating vague, poorly defined regulations.
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As in Putin’s Russia, progressive regulators would have infinite excuses to target a company or an executive at will. Businesses would be allowed to operate only at the sufferance of the Federal Trade Commission, which Chair Lina Khan is aggressively targeting. The bill creates many new mechanisms for government control of business, the hammers of socialism. That is no way to ensure more room for conservatives in social media. That is a way to enforce C-suite wokeness and ideological intolerance.

If conservatives, angered over censorship, enable the Klobuchar bill to become law, the result will be the worsening of Big Tech’s content moderation discrimination – and sometimes outright censorship – of conservative views.

Conservatives in Congress have let their anger blind them to the consequences of lashing out. An impeccably conservative Republican in the House, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, offers a better perspective. Jordan said of similar legislation, “This is about power going to the FTC, the collusion of Big Tech and Big Government to, I think, further censor conservatives, further make limits on our free speech rights.”

Will Republicans in the Senate wake up? Or will their blind anger drive us all over the edge?
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Robert H. Bork Jr. is president of the Antitrust Education Alliance. ​

​Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is a liberal no one should mistake for a Chicago-School economic conservative. When he was at Treasury, Summers presided over a golden economy, a remarkable period of growth, balanced budgets, and low inflation. So when Summers raises alarms about the likely bad outcomes of Biden Administration economic policy, attention must be paid.
 
In 2021, when the U.S. economy was clocking in at 6 percent annual growth, Summers warned that no stimulus was needed. In fact, he predicted that runaway government spending would result in inflation. The United States today is in greater debt to itself than in anytime in our history. And inflation is close to 9 percent.
 
Now Summers is warning about the dangers of progressive antitrust to economic growth and as a potential driver of inflation. While Summers speaks in favor for more antitrust enforcement under current laws, he warned that jettisoning the consumer welfare standard in favor of a “generalized feeling of hostility and outrage” against business is dangerous.
 
Summers says that hipster antitrust is “badly misguided and potentially dangerous to our economic future.” He told Bloomberg Television: “It’s very important that we have antitrust policy based on facts, based on economic science, based on consumers – not on a kind of generalized feeling of hostility and outrage towards business.”
 
Summers also recently tweeted: “Policies that attack bigness can easily be inflationary if they prevent the exploitation of economies of scale or limit superstar firms.” He also tweeted: “The emerging claim that antitrust can combat inflation reflects ‘science denial’ There are many areas like transitory inflation where serious economists differ. Antitrust as an anti-inflation strategy is not one of them.”
 
Summers shows that one can be impeccably liberal and still see that populist antitrust is an inflationary threat to consumers and the economic growth that supports jobs and working families.

​​Real Clear Politics (Commentary)

AEP Poll

​Some moderate and conservative legislators seem to be acting in the belief that their voters support the radical expansion of antitrust policy now popular in Washington.
 
Our recent Antitrust Education Project poll of 1,000 registered voters shows the opposite.
 
When asked whether antitrust law should protect a corporation’s customers or the businesses it competes with, 54 percent of respondents went with the Consumer Welfare Standard – including 58 percent of Democrats.
 
When asked if the current antitrust laws work, 53 percent said they work well, with many agreeing that these laws need better enforcement.
 
And for those politicians who are most concerned about “wokeism” in corporate leadership, take note that a commanding 83 percent of respondents said they oppose bringing partisan politics into antitrust.