The question of breaking up big tech is heating up as a hot topic of conversation especially in public policy. I have been thinking more and more about this question. And the more I listen and read about the subject, the more I come across startling statistics such as the ones I cite below.
Google owns 92% of the market share for search engines. Their next competitor, Yahoo, owns 2.6%. Bing owns less than 2.3%.
Contrast that with a company like ExxonMobil that gets vilified. Yet, Exxon Mobil only own 5% of the marketshare of all oil and gas.
Now what if the owners of Chick-Fil-A owned Google? Do you think many on the Left would even allow them to exist? They would lose their mind that Christians owned 92% of all web searches (shoot, they’d lose their mind if Chick-Fil-A owned even 40% of the market share of the fast food industry!) Yet over 90% of the people at Google donate and vote for one political party. The executives at Google apologized to their employees after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, saying they should have done more to stop him. They know they have the power over information we the people are seeing about political candidates.
Google, by the way, takes hundreds of millions of dollars from the authoritarian Chinese government to censor parts of the internet from the Chinese people. Google has that POWER. If they can do it there, why not here?
Google. Amazon. Facebook. Twitter. They not only control their specific markets on the internet, they control PEOPLE. They control INFORMATION. They control MEDIA. You might argue that Google has more power over the INFORMATION that we the people can access than even the federal government does. And their work with the Chinese government only proves they can manipulate that information. And they have control of 92% of the market of how people can search for that information on the web.
I have been thinking a lot about this issue of whether the government should decentralize these BIG TECH monopolies. From my libertarian-conservative perspective, I get very nervous giving government any power, especially at interfering in the economy. I would instead first attempt to argue that the free market is the answer. Want to beat Google? Come up with a competitor. But in this case, that argument is getting hard to make because the playing field is no longer level and these tech titans have so much power and they’ve used that power to destroy the competition. Jerry Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp has said that Google has so much power over the internet marketplace today that his company, Yelp, would not be possible as a start-up today.
At the end of the day, what we should be concerned about most, is ensuring that POWER is separated, divided, decentralized. The whole point of the U.S. Constitution is to do that with government; and to use government to divide power (among men) against itself.
Earlier today I listened to the Charlie Kirk podcast from June 3 where he lays this all out. I’ve been reading what Senator Josh Hawley has to say on the subject. And just two days ago I read a fascinating (and surprising) column from the well-respected writer Peggy Noonan. They are all hitting at the same thing: POWER and the POWER OVER INFORMATION. I encourage you to listen to Charlie’s podcast on the subject, pay attention to what Senator Josh Hawley is pressing, and read the column by Peggy Noonan. And, please feel free to make your own opinion known in the comments below. And yes, we’ll see if Google’s search engines even allow this to be found by others on the web. But they may not let me much longer. Or they must just be sitting back and laughing that there’s nothing we can do about now anyway. Or, maybe this our last chance to act before their POWER over us increases even more.