Reader Responses to Going Up Against Goliath

Your November-December issue makes a hero out of David Cicilline ’83 (“Going Up Against Goliath”).  Mr. Cicilline is not the white knight to everyone in the country that your issue and his followers admire. Antitrust laws were first passed to protect and encourage competition when big business was led by people like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Edison, Carnegie and Frick, who choked out small competitors and starved their employees. They then had an open field to control wages and prices. Today firms like Amazon pay fine wages and employ thousands of people, thus giving massive and fruitful employment opportunities at fair wages, as well as improving the quality of life for millions. Endless headline-grabbing investigations under the guise of exposing supposed exploitations by America’s high-tech firms is just to keep people like Mr. Cicilline in business. These are not the trusts of the old days when the first antitrust laws were passed.

I hope Congressman Cicilline also looks at applying antitrust theories to new forms of collective abuse by ‘big tech’ companies. Their huge internet presence and use of content control underlie more recent online practices that are repressive and destructive to democracy.

To wit: Collection and unsavory merchandising of personal information has generated well-justified privacy concerns. Google, Facebook and ISP’s have, for billions of people, search histories, URLs accessed, emails, upload and download histories, personal texts, cloud storage data, streaming media use, metadata and more.

That proprietary ocean of data with a suitable search engine constitutes a private, unregulated spying and intelligence capability that dwarfs the NSA. It has unimaginable value for dark purposes like insider financial trading or blackmail, both political and personal. Access remains invisible and unregulated, likely because it is available without accountability to Congress. Much has been written about support for repressive governments by ‘big tech’ but little about the inside presence of the federal government, especially the military. Apple, Google and Facebook have allegedly had capital investments from the military. To what end?

The 2020 election saw the public emergence of highly partisan political censorship of web-based news (though it was certainly present long before). It was even used to attack personal blogs, like Twitter’s blackout of President Trump.

Obviously, new monopolistic abuses by ‘big tech’ have been innovative. Any response by Congress will, per usual, be determined not by the public interest but by contributions to campaign funds and ‘big tech’ has virtually unlimited money available.

Perhaps BAM could consider asking Rep. Cicilline to discuss these issues (including the sources of his own funding), and whether there is any real hope of addressing them given such powerful opposition and embedded corruption.

Mr. Cicilline, by all means, deal with Zuckerberg. Just don’t mess with my YouTube (“Going Up Against Goliath,” November/December).