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Gov. Ron DeSantis Goes to War Against Big Tech
It’s time that someone started to fight back against big tech, and Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the pack. Here’s what he had to say a few days ago:
‘As these companies have grown and their influence has expanded, Big Tech has come to look more like Big Brother with each passing day,’ DeSantis told reporters at the Capitol. ‘But this is 2021, not 1984, and this is real life, not George Orwell’s fiction. These companies exert monopoly power over a centrally important forum in the public discourse and the access of information that Floridians rely on.’
The legislation he is considering helps to protect companies that post on these platforms by insisting that the tech companies give advance notice of removal, and they will be vulnerable to Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Practices Law; if a candidate is removed during an election cycle, the tech companies would receive a $100,000 fine each day until the candidate’s access is restored.
Gov. DeSantis was brought on board at the initiative of Florida House of Representatives member Randy Fine. The media is trying to position their stances as their way to support President Trump, but DeSantis emphasized that the issues were much larger than any one person:
DeSantis cited multiple examples of overreach by social media content moderators, including censorship of criticism of the of coronavirus lock downs, banning the sitting U.S. president, the suppression of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden story, and the ‘decapitation’ of Parler, a Twitter alternative popular with President Donald Trump’s supporters that was kicked offline by Amazon Web Services for purportedly failing to impose satisfactory content moderation.
The proposed legislation also allows users to “opt out of the various algorithms these platforms use to steer content or suppress content from the view of other users.”
There are some critical questions that are yet to be answered:
- Will Gov. DeSantis follow through and back the legislation?
- Will Florida have the power to hold big tech accountable?
- Will other states follow Florida’s example and take action?
I hope the governor moves forward and that other governors back him up. It’s time.
Published in Law
My point about differentiating between the AT&T case and the Big Tech situation is that in AT&T’s case, the government destroyed a lot of its wealth. That won’t happen with Google and Facebook. Their wealth is the personal data they have. It’s their property unless the government figures out a legal way to make them destroy it, which I don’t see happening.
So I’m not worried about a case to consider them a public utility ending up in destroying private property, the way it did with AT&T.
I’m all in favor of allowing Facebook, Google and Twitter to control what is posted on their lawns. Unless they own 50 percent of the lawns in America, and 75 percent of those that are suitable for sign placement. In that case I would want to study the situation more closely.
The public utility argument has been bruited before, and it just does not apply. First off, it basically quasi-nationalizes social media, and only the big ones at that. How well has the government done with other things it has quasi-nationalized? Not well, that’s for sure. All that does is entrench those companies as the government-approved behemoths while locking out competitors who do not want the risks of getting that big and being captured too. And then who actually does the work of regulating these industries once captured? People hired right out of those companies. Don’t think for a minute that Facebook or Twitter or Google fear this prospect – in fact, it’s exactly what they want.
And are you aware that AT&T became the monopoly it did in no small part because of government regulation? Is that the future you want for any internet company that gets big enough? AT&T got really really rich dominating the US phone system for decades – not only did they charge you for the phone service, their rates were exorbitant even as the technology made the old rate structure increasingly irrelevant, they made you use only their hardware, which they leased to you, and they didn’t exactly keep their networks up to spec more than absolutely necessary.
Thanks! I’ve never been credited with always clarifying. Of being consistent, yes: occasionally Barfly and others credit me with always obfuscating.
[EDIT: I re-read the sentence. I had been basking in the praise. But now I realize that you were saying you always thank me on those occasions when I do clarify. Even so, it is a nice thought.]
[TAGS: Attempted self-effacing humor, Forgetting one’s numerous promises to never attempt self-effacing humor on Ricochet again.]
It depends on which prospect you’re talking about. There are a lot of proposals for regulating Big Tech and it sounds like you’re arguing against some of those that didn’t come from Gov. De Santis. It seems he is trying to avoid some of those problems. Whether successfully or not is less clear.
I was responding to Marci and what she proposed.
We need to separate the questions:
The second one is covered by our legal tradition: Jewish, Roman, Ecclesiastical, English/Viking. It’s normal stuff for our legal eagles.
The first one is hard.
We can cite the success of the Civil Rights Acts in eliminating the cruelty of public houses refusing to serve blacks. But we mustn’t forget that these laws overturned well-understood limits on the right of government to commandeer private property to prevent behavior that was merely mean-spirited or that we considered socially backward, not criminal. We were tempted by our good intentions onto a slippery slope: now the Federal and State governments have unlimited authority to engineer society. They decided that they wanted homosexuals to have the same privileges to violate property rights as people of different colors. Then Lesbians to adopt children, then female impersonators to have special privileges, then for every kind of sexual pervert to corrupt our own children’s morals in mandatory schools, and so on.
In hindsight, it appears that we should have kept our traditional rights in tact, and peacefully ended discrimination in restaurants and so on by moral education. These evils were already on the way out, rapidly.
Good point. I can see that.
Lots of good arguments here.
I guess I just need to pray that competitors arise, in which case, the less regulation the better. Skipsul is right. Lower the barriers to entry.
I agree that the civil rights acts created new types of discrimination. I’m not sure segregation would have gone away on its own, but that’s for another day.
That said, those laws exist, and they include political affiliation. I have no doubt, however, that Google and Facebook are way ahead of me in avoiding those accusations and charges.
GE had a legal department bigger than the U.S. Justice Department in its heyday. I’m sure Facebook and Google do too.
I live in Florida and DeSantis is very smart. He is a good person and more power to him as well as Congressman Matt Gaetz. I really started to pay attention to DeSantis when he was invited by Netanyahu and Israel to come and share business ideas for a common purpose and show his support of The State of Israel back in May 2019. That sold me – he’s the genuine article:
https://www.flgov.com/2019/05/31/governor-ron-desantis-leads-historic-business-development-mission-to-israel-with-florida-delegation/
Or… he will win.
That’s a good example to keep in mind. I’ve thought of it often when thinking of the problem of Big Tech censorship. I’ll add another related example that I’ve mentioned a few times:
We used to have the concept of “states rights” under which the Feds were forbidden to interfere with certain matters inside state jurisdictions. However, the country found the problem of slavery intolerable, especially after Dred Scott and the Fugutive Slave Act, when slave states insisted that non-slave states participate in their slavery system, too. The resulting conflict broke down the whole system of states rights, necessarily and unfortunately.
Similarly, the country eventually decided that segregation in business places and public housing was intolerable, and the solution broke down many of the walls of separation between private and public domains. Ever since 1964 I have wished the Civil Rights Acts could have been accomplished by constitutional amendment rather than simple legislation, because a constitutional amendment could have placed limits on the further reach of government into areas that should remain under control of private business. Instead, we got legislation that established a precedent of government control of private business practices.
But what would have been the chances of a constitutional amendment in 1964? None at all. And I have to agree that the situation was intolerable. So we got what we got.
If states had not been so belligerent in institutionalizing slavery, if segregationists had not been so belligerent in maintaining segregation, if more of us could have acted in our private capacities to end segregation, we probably could have continued with our old system of limited federal powers.
I think we’re now confronting a similar situation. It was one thing when Big Tech companies practiced arbitrary political censorship in the services they provide. But that isn’t good enough; they and their allies have also embarked on a seek and destroy mission to eliminate any chance of free conversation on the internet or in any other medium. It wasn’t good enough to destroy Parler; they are now going after the places where people went after Parler came down. That is an intolerable situation and will not work itself out in the free market in time to save our constitutional system. So that means we’re probably going to break down the barriers against the power of government to regulate media companies. It seems that is going to be necessary and it is going to be bad for us.
I’m still in favor of accomplishing the objective in ways that don’t break down the remaining barriers between public and private. But that’s going to mean doing more than sitting on our thumbs and reciting the rules about free markets and constitutional governmental limitations.
This is exactly my understanding of why what happened, happened. As Lincoln pointed out very clearly in the Second Inaugural Address, there was always an unresolved national matter to be settled, a contradiction, created by the Declaration.
The Americans collectively fell into this passive state–it was tolerable for now. Overthrowing Parliament and King George first, and then fighting the War of 1812, and so on. But it was not tolerable forever, and then many things came together to make it a crisis. One of these was when the slavers demanded our collaboration in hunting down what they claimed were their lost livestock, and which we (according to our original contract with those same States) regarded as human beings.
The thing is the center will always be corrupt and if cleaned up a bit will immediately head back. It has to be bottom up and that is very difficult to return to, presumably not impossible.