Is Google a bigger threat to democracy than Trump? A debate.

The Biden era has witnessed a revolution in the Democratic Party’s approach to policing large corporations. Under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission has grown markedly more aggressive in blocking mergers and cracking down on big business’s exploitative practices. This has earned Khan’s FTC plaudits from critics of corporate power. But Khan’s policies have also attracted the indignation of the Democratic Party’s supporters in Silicon Valley, as well as concerns from some longtime civil servants at the FTC, who question the strategic and substantive wisdom of Khan’s approach to antitrust enforcement. Both these factions are now bitterly fighting for presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s favor.

In a cover story for Harper’s Magazine this month, Barry Lynn makes the case for the “antitrust revolution.” Lynn is the intellectual godfather of the modern antimonopoly movement. Once a business reporter, he has spent the better part of two decades chronicling the evils of corporate concentration. His antimonopoly think tank, the Open Markets Institute, employed Khan as its legal director before she entered government. 

In his Harper’s essay, Lynn frames the fight against Big Tech in apocalyptic terms. He argues that the power of Google and Amazon today is analogous to that of absolute monarchs in the 17th century — and that such corporate titans pose an even more pressing threat to American democracy than Donald Trump.

I sympathize with many of Lynn’s concerns and think that Khan’s FTC has done a lot of good. But I also found parts of Lynn’s Harper’s piece hyperbolic and unconvincing. So I spoke with him about my objections, the impact of Big Tech on journalism and publishing, the political power of small business, whether monopolies have made America more racist, and other topics. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. 

In your Harper’s essay, you suggested that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple wield power analogous to that of absolute monarchs, and that together they constitute a greater threat to political liberty in the United States than Donald Trump.

But is there not a categorical difference between wielding a lot of influence over commerce and controlling a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as monarchs and, to an extent, presidents do? Google doesn’t have the power to selectively prosecute and imprison public officials it does not like. But an authoritarian president plausibly could. So why do you think Big Tech is ultimately the bigger threat?

I think the clear point I was trying to make is that these are both really disturbing, terrifying concentrations of power. In the case of Trump, the White House, even after the recent decision in the Supreme Court, there’s still an immense number of restraints on the presidency. 

What you’re talking about — we’re not there yet. And whatever Trump has said, it’s going to take him a few steps at least to get there. Whereas what we’re talking about right now with big tech is where we are now. This is not theoretical. This is the power they have now, so that’s a really key thing to keep in mind.

But would you agree that there are constraints on the power of these companies in the current context? I think even before the recent revival of aggressive enforcement at the FTC, the government sussed out collusion in terms of hiring practices among these big tech companies. So are there not limits that these companies need to operate within, just as the president currently does?

In that case, what you had is, some tens of thousands of employees who were being restricted in their ability to go from one company to another through no-poach agreements. Yes, they did win that case. But I think it was like a $5 million fine, and a little pretend slap on the wrist, don’t do it again. [Editor’s note: The companies paid $415 million to settle a civil suit over the no-poach agreements.]

That was affecting the lives of a lot of people, and they got a little slap on the wrist. I don’t think that that case in itself had very much effect on their sense of the power of the government.

When I’m talking about their power, it’s not just the power over their workers. 

I first got into this work, not through Google, but through Amazon. When I published my book, Cornered, it was 2010. And in the process of writing that book, I had really spent a lot of time talking to my editor, to my agent, and then, to other people who were writing books and to their editors. And I realized that American publishers with Amazon were facing a situation in which you had a company that controlled the gate to the marketplace — and was unconstrained by any traditional laws requiring them to keep the gate open equally for all comers. They had the ability to open and close the gate arbitrarily to the marketplace.

Were there any examples of them doing that in an egregious way that illustrates the danger of that kind of power?

Oh, yes. I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs and publishers back then, David Young at Hachette USA. I spoke to Drake McFeely at Norton. These are one-on-one meetings. And the basic thing was: When the door was open, they would say, “Amazon is our absolute best customer.” When the door was closed, they’d say “Amazon is a dictator that was entirely interfering in our business in arbitrary ways. We don’t have access to the marketplace. We don’t connect with the reader, the buyer, because Amazon’s determining how we’re connecting.” And that’s only gotten worse over the last 15 years. [Editor’s note: Young neither confirmed nor denied this account, saying he did not remember meeting Lynn, as it would have been more than 15 years ago. McFeely could not be reached for comment.]

In February 2010, Amazon shut off the buy buttons for McMillan. McMillan was complaining [that Amazon was devaluing its authors’ work by charging only $9.99 for ebooks]. What Amazon did is they just said no more “buy” buttons. It’s like: You’re not selling on Amazon. Back then, Amazon was probably responsible for 40, 50 percent of their book sales in the United States. It’s now higher, much higher. But even if it’s only 40, 50 percent, you can’t stand to lose that much of your capacity for sales, so they gave up. 

Were any of the conflicts between publishers and Amazon explicitly about the content of work, as opposed to terms of compensation for ebooks?

About the content? There was some point at which, I think it was Tom Cotton or somebody who was on TV or Fox — a politician who was having a fit about how they’re being suppressed.

But let’s just say there is no evidence of Amazon ever trying to suppress a particular viewpoint, right? But, there’s two things. One is, when you either suppress a particular publisher because they don’t have the money to pay you the extortionary rates of advertising, then you’re less likely to be found. You have less opportunity to make your way to the market. Two, when you promote one book, you suppress every other book in the marketplace.

There’s a two-way amplification of a book — amplification of a publisher — so that there’s de facto suppression of all the books, de facto suppression of all other publishers. You can have very large effects on what books are being published, how they’re being sold, what ideas people are connecting with. The effects can be a byproduct of a business model, a byproduct of unconscious decisions that were somewhat automated that have no political intent in and of themselves. But they have a political effect.

I imagine there’s an analogy there to your view of the role that algorithms on social media play, in terms of amplifying. Maybe it’s a completely neutral algorithm that is just amplifying whatever gets the most engagement. But that has implications for what content ultimately gets the most attention. 

Yeah. But the thing is that as these middlemen — who are in between the people who are speaking and the people who are listening, in between the author and the readers, the author and the voter, in between the creator and the buyer, the seller and the buyer — as these masters in the middle gather more and more and more information about each individual person, and about each individual company, they use that information to manipulate both sides of the market.

More and more perfectly, they use it to push you as a reader: Oh, you liked a book about this battle in World War II. Well, you’re going to like another book about this battle in World War II, and you’re going to like this third book about this battle in World War II. And then, you know what, there’s this guy who’s used an analogy to that battle in World War II to talk about Trump politics, maybe you’ll like him too. So you can see how a couple of things happen when you have this kind of a system, which is that as they feed off their knowledge of you, they drag you more and more to what we used to call filter bubbles.

I feel like there’s an argument that what you’re describing isn’t that different from organic processes of knowledge acquisition, which existed before the internet. Like, say you are a left wing-minded person, and you read a book by Tom Frank in the early 2000s or something. And that gets you interested in other books that he’s written, and authors that he cites, and you start subscribing to certain magazines, and that self-reinforcing kind of interest or ideology is a natural process that humans engage in when learning about the world, and developing interests, and that this isn’t necessarily such an insidious—

Yeah, absolutely. You’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing. That’s how we educate ourselves. But, there’s a huge difference between when Tom Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas? and then that leads you to a review of it in the Nation; I started reading the Nation. I had to take out a subscription to the Nation, maybe. I take out a subscription to Mother Jones. But maybe, I learned that there’s actually a left-wing bookstore in Chicago, and I go to that bookstore, and I find a whole bunch of other books. And so, then suddenly, it’s like I found a bunch of work, and a bunch of people that helped me answer the questions that I’ve been asking. And so, that’s fantastic, and I certainly live that life.

But, when you have fewer and fewer, and fewer places that you’re interacting with, when you get down to one major place where you’re going to buy books online, when you get down to one major place or two major places — if you’re getting most of your news off of TikTok or you get it off of Facebook — you’re not going to read the New York Times, and that’s going to make it very hard for you to link out to the New York Times site. You’re getting most of your news off the platform.

At that point, exploration is not something you control. You have then actually lost your sovereignty. You’ve lost your ability to control your own destiny in this process, and you go where they take you. Now, you went to a really good college; you know how to protect yourself against some of this bullshit. But I bet that sometimes you find yourself getting suckered in on it. But a lot of folks don’t know how to protect themselves.

To get to a separate claim in your Harper’s piece: You write that monopolists are a leading driver of “the surge in racism and homophobia” and “the attacks on reproductive choice” in the United States. I was wondering what you were thinking about specifically here. To me, it is not clear that there has even been a surge in racism and anti-gay bigotry in the United States; support for marriage for same-sex and interracial couples remains near record highs in Gallup’s polling. And in any case, certainly America has grown more progressive on race and gender since 1981 — the year that you believe that antitrust policy changed for the worse. 

So what’s your timeline here? I mean, you gotta separate out the different things. Okay? It’s like, yeah, okay, in 1981, Reagan makes it easier for General Electric to roll up control over televisions, or he makes it easier for Walmart to roll up control over retail. So at that point, you’re not actually dealing with communications platforms. So there’s a revolutionary change in how we do competition policy, which is applied initially to industrial and retail firms. 

So it didn’t happen all at once. Reagan starts the process. Clinton then extends it to banking, to the defense industrial base, to oil and gas, to telecommunications. And then what you have over time with telecommunications, you have a shift in business models, which takes place around 15 years ago — 10 to 15 years ago — from relatively unobtrusive forms of manipulation, to manipulation as the foundation of the business model. So to say that, well, between 1981 and 2011, racism and homophobia went down in the United States, and then even though it has increased radically in the years since, that my thesis is somehow wrong, I don’t follow.

Well, I think it’s an open question to me whether they’ve increased radically since then versus becoming more visible because of the way these platforms amplify certain speech.

You’re taking parts of the thesis out and you’re saying, “Well, I’m not sure that it works.” So it’s like, if you take the thesis apart, then yeah, then maybe things start to fall apart. But the thesis is that the reason that these people have these abilities is because we fail to apply traditional anti-monopoly laws.

Yeah, I agree that that’s the overarching thesis.

Yeah. Okay. So what’s the issue then?

So I also wanted to touch on the claim about reproductive choice. I agree that large businesses are involved in the Federalist Society, and the right’s project there is both to empower big business and to restrict abortion rights. At the same time, when I look at FEC filings, the large tech monopolists of our age throughout the past 10 years have generally given a lot more money to the Democratic Party — the pro-choice party — then to the pro-life party. If their money determined these elections, then Dobbs wouldn’t have happened. And there’s lots of small businesses and regional businesses that fund the American right. 

Eric, corporations are complicated things. They do a lot of different things at the same time. They curry favor on both sides. Look at Mr. Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz, right? Two months ago, he was all in for Trump. Now it looks like his friend, Harris, may win. So suddenly, he’s like, “Oh, poor Harris.” Andreessen is still out there, totally 100% in. Crazy-ass Andreessen is still out there 100% in for Trump. Musk is leaping up and down like a maniac on the stage in Pennsylvania.

So really, you’re going to say because Google threw some money behind some Democrats — and even then, it’s like, was it Google or is it the individuals in the corporation? Corporations, they do with their money what makes sense for them politically.

Do you think that small- and regional-sized businesses are any different in that respect?

Small- and medium-sized business, they’re different because they’re less politically powerful.

But can’t small business interests pool together in the Chamber of Commerce, in various other systems to …

Yeah, of course, that’s their right. But it’s very different. A Chamber of Commerce is generally much less powerful as an organization than a large corporation. You got a whole bunch of different people who are working through an issue. There’s a lot of things they’re going to agree on. There’s a lot of things they’re going to disagree on. So the things they disagree on, they tend not to take political positions. So it’s just a basic rule of democracy that dividing power is going to make it less likely that an actor is going to rise up and threaten the democratic system.

To play devil’s advocate, what do you make of the idea that actually, small businesses — precisely because in this country, we have this deep-seated yeoman farmer ideal, and the small proprietor has cultural cache —  that this actually gives them pretty significant power over politics.

Oh my god, you’re repeating to me ancient libertarian truisms. 

Well, but there are lots of federal regulations — labor regulations — that small businesses are exempt from while large businesses have to abide by them. And so there are these ways in which arguably, the government shows some degree of affection for small businesses that maybe is not extended to large corporations. 

I have no understanding of how you could actually come to that conclusion. I mean, it’s like the affection for small business is just some little crumbs that Congress tosses to the little people once every four years or once every two years. And almost any one of these, they’re recent. Go do your homework, go actually look at how the SBA operates. Look at how every one of these laws that’s designed for farming support, where that money goes to. Very little of it goes to the small actor. It’s just enough to shut them up. Other than, say, Vance and Hawley, and Warren and Klobuchar, who’s really making their business taking on big corporations? So where is this imaginary world in which the government is favoring small business over big business?

Well, I guess I’m just referring specifically to both proposed legislation and actual laws that exempt companies with, say, less than 25 employees from this or that federal regulation. There seems to be a sensitivity—

Wait, wait, wait, listen. The point of this conversation is not to go in and re-litigate antiquated conversations that the libertarians put together in the 1970s. If you want to have this, you go read my book. You can read my first book, you can read my second book, you can read my third book. You can read all kinds of other work that’s out there. We don’t have to waste our time — while I’m driving down the highway — having these arguments. Go do some reading. 

Well, I mean, I’m partially speaking for readers who haven’t necessarily done all that reading and would like to know what—

No, no, this is your job. You can go read and you can explain it. Like I said, go read Cornered. Go read Liberty From All Masters. Go read Sally Hubbard’s or Jasper T. Scott’s books. There’s a lot of books that get it just from different levels, different angles.

There’s all kinds of articles you can read up on. There’s been just a broad destruction of independent business across America over the last 40 years. If you want to learn some of the math, you can go get a copy of Liberty From All Masters. I do the math about Walmart. 

Retail was designed in the old days to serve everybody. The business was regulated to ensure that any family with some wherewithal could get into it, go out and start a business, to start a grocery. And these weren’t little rinky-dink groceries. They’re family-owned supermarkets.

For a long period of time, all of the great technological advances that were made in groceries were made by independent people trying to get ahead of their rival down the street. Now, if you are Walmart and your rival down the street is Walmart, and down the next town, the rival is Walmart, you don’t have to do a damn thing.

Isn’t Walmart under competitive pressure from Amazon?

Oh my god. Yeah, of course, they’re under a little bit of competitive pressure from Amazon. And Google’s under a little bit of competitive pressure on certain lines of business from Apple. Right? But it doesn’t mean that this is an open and democratic system. It doesn’t mean that it’s a system that is designed to prevent fascism and the absolute concentration of power over. Again, Eric, you got to do your homework. If you wanted to have a conversation, you want to be the devil’s advocate, come at me with something that’s worthwhile. 

Great. I will ask you a question that maybe you’ll like better. So, the other thing I wanted to ask about from your Harper’s piece: You discussed the Supreme Court’s decision in Moody versus NetChoice. A colleague of mine wrote about it as well. At issue in that case was whether the governments of Florida and Texas could prohibit social media platforms from taking down posts based on the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression. Justice Elena Kagan argued that Texas’s proposed restrictions on content moderation would effectively compel Facebook to tolerate neo-Nazi and pro-teen suicide content on their platforms and this would constitute a violation of those firms’ rights of free speech.

You suggested that by making this ruling, the liberal justices mounted as “outriders for autocracy,” and you argued that giving social media platforms the right to moderate content at their own whim was as antithetical to democracy as giving the president criminal immunity from official acts. And so, what would you say to a liberal, like my colleague, Ian Millhiser, who believes that allowing major platforms to bar pro-anorexia and pro-genocide content is actually in the public interest, and that enabling right-wing state governments to dictate which points of view private companies must platform would itself put us on a slippery slope to authoritarianism?

If you go read the decision, a corporation has First Amendment rights as a corporation. Publishers have First Amendment rights as publishers. The case that we are making and what many other people are making — and this can give you a misunderstanding — is that these are platforms, not publishers. Platforms are curators. And so platforms are places where people come together to communicate with each other, where publishers come to gather with readers to share information with each other. And if you allow the master in the middle, the middle man, to manipulate that, then you have grossly interfered with the rights of the 330 million people in America — I guess, some of them are babies, so they’re not necessarily using these platforms — but every American youth relies on these platforms to communicate with other Americans.

So I’d say that Kagan’s thinking is that she’s basically advocating for the suppression of the First Amendment rights of every citizen of the United States who relies on these platforms. 

As for the idea that Florida and Texas and Ohio are going to force these platforms to carry what the states want them to, no. It’s like there’s a missing part of this conversation, and it’s called the terms of service. All these people have a right to publish terms of service. And under terms of service, they can say, “We’re not going to carry racist material.” We can say, “We’re not going to carry stuff that we believe is harmful to kids, that seems to promote eating disorders or suicide.”

So then, once you publish your terms of service, you can say, “We’re not going to publish anything that seems to advocate violence.” And it’s like, as long as you apply the terms of service equally without favor to all of your users, then you can shut down whatever you want.

But is there any principle that binds what they can put into a terms of service? It seems to me that, by this logic, if the social media company establishes a politically biased term of service, then that could result in what you’re concerned about — and I’m concerned about as well — in terms of deplatforming legitimate points of view. So what legally binds a company from just crafting the terms of service so they can discriminate against whichever point of view they want to suppress?  

Well, the thing is that at a certain point, the Essential Facilities Doctrine, traditional American communications doctrine, is once you get to a certain size, that would be discriminatory. Political discrimination is illegal. 

I just want to clarify the principles here. It seems to me there’s no way to permit all political speech regardless of its perspective on social media platforms and prohibit racist speech from them (since there is a lot of racist, political speech). So I guess, how do you see resolving that? I took you as saying that basically: We should have a situation where you can express any viewpoint on these platforms — no matter how vile — if it isn’t direct harassment or a direct violent threat, but that the platform shouldn’t be amplifying that speech. Is that correct? Or what is your view?

People can go to the branded publications, right? If you wanted to hear a certain kind of speech — if your morning’s not going to be complete without a big plate of racism along with your eggs and your coffee — then you can have a racist publication. You can have a Nazi publication. And the people who need that, they can go sit on the website of the publication and get what they want. That’s the beauty of America, is that you don’t need the middleman to boost it. And you can still get it, you can still go find it. 

Great. Well, there are a few other questions I had, but you’re running close to time, right?

Yeah. I appreciate you trying to be a devil’s advocate, but I just encourage you, as you’re working through this — because you’re smart, you’re clearly asking a lot of the right questions — is just continue to do your research. Don’t react. And whenever you’re starting to see stuff that is reacting against the kind of stuff that we’re doing, just question, “Who is paying for that?” Just question who it is. Because almost every single person who’s coming at us, someone is paying for that person to come at us.