Why we must break up Big Tech

Their time has come.

NOTE: This speech was delivered at the University of Iowa on September 22nd, 2021 during the "Policy Challenges for Iowa and the Nation" discussion series hosted by Iowa’s Board of Regents along with the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center and College of Law.

Thank you to University President Barb Wilson, Regent David Barker, Law School Dean Kevin Washburn, Law Professor Todd Pettys, Dr. Pete Damiano, and the rest of the great team for the warm welcome back to the University of Iowa.

Thank you to my fellow panelists, Carl Szabo and Tracy Griffith, for joining the discussion.

And thank you to the two Iowa state senators — Amy Sinclair and Zach Wahls — for agreeing to provide their insights after our discussion.

I am a proud Iowa and Iowa Law grad.

And as someone who was a very vocal — some would say an obnoxious — Republican student organizer on this liberal campus back in 2000, 2002, and 2004, I very much appreciated — and needed — First Amendment protections.

And it was Political Science Professor Tim Hagle — my faculty advisor, mentor, and friend — who saved my neck too many times to count. Professor Hagle is truly a champion for free speech on campus, regardless of a student’s political leanings.

And he won’t admit this now. But my friend and classmate Peter Matthes, who is now a top aide to the University President, was very much a co-conspirator. He was just smart enough not to get caught.

I particularly want to thank Dean Washburn for inviting me to join today’s discussion. Dean Washburn is a great ambassador for the University of Iowa in Washington, DC, where he works very effectively to secure key clerkships and jobs for his law students — regardless of their politics.

We have different political views. But he understands the critical importance of allowing all sides to speak and to be heard.

Understanding and appreciating our differences helps bring us together. And that benefits all of us.

That is why censorship and cancel culture are so troubling to me. When you marginalize, you radicalize.

So I started two national advocacy organizations — the Internet Accountability Project and Unsilenced Majority — that combat both censorship and cancel culture.

And today’s biggest proponents, enablers, and enforcers of censorship and cancel culture are the trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple — along with their little brother, Twitter.

Because of their antitrust amnesty and Section 230 immunity, Big Tech monopolists have an unholy alliance with Big Government to censor, silence, deplatform, and even cancel those with whom they disagree.

When dealing with a monopolist, there’s only one neck for the government to choke.

We just saw smoking-gun evidence of this when the White House press secretary nonchalantly announced that the government is working with Facebook to censor COVID “misinformation.”

As if the COVID science doesn’t evolve as we learn new facts, Tony Fauci is some infallible COVID god, and Jen Psaki runs the ministry of truth.

And Big Tech, ever eager to keep the regime happy, takes its censorship marching orders.

When they censor under the guise of protecting us from “misinformation,” they’re either obliviously or maliciously arrogant about their appropriate role in a free society.

The United States isn’t China — yet.

Let’s talk about more examples of Big Tech’s political censorship.

Hillary Clinton still falsely claims that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.

Yet Big Tech de-platformed Trump, as a sitting President, for claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.

And before the election, Big Tech censored the New York Post — our nation’s oldest continuous newspaper — for publishing negative stories on Joe Biden’s potential foreign corruption, following the discovery of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.

How did Big Tech justify this brazen political censorship?

They claimed the emails were fake and this was a Russian disinformation campaign — both of which we now know are clearly false.

Big Tech has been particularly egregious with its COVID censorship.

They’re censoring noted doctors, scientists, and even a sitting United States senator who also happens to be a doctor.

Even if one is ignorant or arrogant enough to believe that they are the ultimate arbiter of truth, how does censoring dissenting doctors and scientists help convince vaccine-hesitant Americans — disproportionately Black and Hispanic Americans — overcome their concerns and get vaccinated?

Censorship is counter-productive. Even deadly. It politicizes the scientific debate. It makes people lose confidence in the science, particularly the science behind vaccines.

COVID vaccines are even more effective than advertised, especially as it relates to hospitalizations and deaths.

But many people don’t believe this.

One of the reasons is that censorship has created mistrust.

We don’t need Tony Fauci, Jen Psaki, and their censors at Facebook to protect us from ourselves.

Get the information out there, good or bad, right or wrong. And let people make their own informed decisions, in consultation with their own medical providers.

How did we get here — and how we do move past this?

During the internet’s infancy, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The purpose of Section 230 was to promote free speech online, by shielding the internet providers from defamation lawsuits based upon what their users post.

So if I dialed up America Online in 1997 and posted that I saw Peter Matthes passed out on the Ped Mall on Tuesday afternoon, Peter could sue me for defamation. (Unless, of course, I was telling the truth.)

But under Section 230, Peter couldn’t sue AOL for my defamation, like Peter could sue others for my defamation.

We didn’t want AOL to get into the business of serving as the speech police.

Section 230 made a lot of sense at the time. We wanted to promote the internet economy and free speech generally, and this required protecting the internet infants from defamation lawsuits — oftentimes driven by the big publishers — that would’ve wiped these internet startups off the map.

Fast forward 25 years, and the public square is now largely online. People more frequently exchange ideas — and political jabs — on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, than they do on the Ped Mall or the T. Anne Cleary Walkway.

And there’s been a changing of the online guard — and they’re increasingly much more powerful and much less concerned about free speech.

Indeed, we’ve replaced the internet infants of 1996 — AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy — with today’s trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists.

Through a bad combination of Section 230 immunity since 1996 and antitrust amnesty over the last decade, these Big Tech platforms have amassed too much power and control over our lives.

And they are using Section 230 as a censorship sword, instead of as the intended free-speech shield.

There are no real competitors to Big Tech, especially as it relates to online speech. Google owns YouTube. Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

If these platforms actually had to compete for users (including for the users’ very valuable online time and data), it’s much less likely the platforms would mistreat the users — including censoring them.

If these users actually had platform options, it’s much less likely that the users would remain on a platform that mistreats them — including censoring them.

A good example of this is Parler, a startup competitor to Twitter.

Conservatives angry with Twitter’s censorship of President Trump and others began to join Parler, in a mass exodus from Twitter. Parler quickly attained a valuation of $1.3 billion.

So instead of trying to woo back these conservative users from a new competitor by changing its censorship policies, Twitter simply killed the competition.

Indeed, Parler got blamed for the January 6th Capitol protests, even though the FBI’s evidence is clear that the protesters largely organized on Facebook.

Then Google and Apple kicked Parler out of the App Store duopoly.

And Amazon kicked Parler off the internet.

Twitter continues its censorship business as usual.

Why did we ignore the Sherman Act — our century-old antitrust law — for over a decade and allow Big Tech to become trillion-dollar monopolists?

Why did we allow these trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists to use Section 230 to stifle, instead of promote, free speech?

Why did we create these online monsters?

How do we fix this?

We must do 2 important things:

1.    We must end Big Tech’s antitrust amnesty, and our federal and state law enforcers must enforce our century-old antitrust laws. We cannot continue to allow trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists to kill competitors, like Parler, control the online public square, and censor our thoughts. We must break-up Big Tech.

The good news is that the House Judiciary Committee recently passed 6 bipartisan bills to rein in Big Tech.

These bills are championed by David Cicilline, a liberal Democrat Trump impeachment manager from Rhode Island, and Ken Buck, a conservative Republican from Colorado.

Senator Chuck Grassley — my former boss, our senior senator, and the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee — is working across the aisle with Senator Amy Klobuchar — the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee chair — on a bipartisan compromise to get these much-needed Big Tech reforms enacted into law this Congress.

We should all support these bipartisan efforts.

2.    We must reform or repeal Big Tech’s Section 230 immunity, so they can no longer censor, silence, de-platform, and even cancel those with whom they disagree. This leads to government-sponsored censorship, and Jen Psaki made it clear that the government is actively working with Facebook to censor Americans.

We need more competition, not less.

We need more free speech, not less.

Thank you for hearing me out, and I look forward to the discussion and questions.