No images? Click here Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we argue that Congress should focus on the national security threats posed by Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, along with TikTok.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing last week featuring TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s first congressional testimony. Rather than a deliberation, the committee kicked off the meeting with a verdict: TikTok, the Chinese social media app with at least 150 million U.S. monthly users, poses a grave threat of foreign influence and causes too many harms to kids online. Thus, it should be banned. Given the wider geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, many Americans are sympathetic to the idea that a Chinese-owned app designed for the U.S. market is a national security risk. Indeed, it is possible that managers at ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, may fall under the pressure of the Chinese government requesting access to TikTok’s data. The U.S. government cannot ignore the risk of allowing a foreign power to manipulate our public discourse and access our personal data. But banning TikTok alone would not address the larger threat to U.S. national security posed by how America’s own Big Tech corporations run the core communication platforms on which our society and democracy depend. That’s why a smarter way to fight foreign interference and buttress the security of our nation and of individual Americans citizens is to broadly use antimonopoly enforcement and law to reinvigorate our domestic rules for business conduct. If anything, a ban solely on the Chinese-owned app may actually make the situation worse, such as by feeding into Facebook’s narrative that TikTok is the “real” threat to America, whereas Facebook and other U.S. tech corporations, on the other hand, are helping to protect U.S. national security. As the Washington Post reported last year, Facebook paid lobbyists to use TikTok as a way to deflect public opinion away from its own privacy and antitrust problems. By contrast, if we look at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and TikTok through the same lens, we see that they all pose a variety of roughly similar threats to U.S. security. And we will see that these threats - as a group - can be tackled largely with the same tools. Consider that Google’s YouTube illegally profited from American kids’ personal data and only promised to change its practices when it was fined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). And that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok amplified false claims of U.S. election fraud. And that Elon Musk, since acquiring Twitter, has repeatedly used the platform to censor American journalists. And that Apple is highly subject to punishment by the Politburo in Beijing because of it’s dependence on manufacturing there. So too Twitter. As national security expert Max Boot wrote recently, “China is a major manufacturing and sales hub for Tesla, a company Musk leads.” Furthermore, these U.S. corporations have repeatedly used their power in ways that have disrupted democracy in key American allies. Google’s monopoly over advertising tools — used to buy and sell ad space across the web — fuels disinformation in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, as this ProPublica report last year made clear. In India, YouTube and Twitter have blocked international content that the ruling party dislikes, and Twitter recently allowed the Indian government to block the accounts of its opponents as well. The good news is that the same antitrust tools that can make Big Tech safer here at home can also help us address these other threats. For example, as Open Markets’ legal director Sandeep Vaheesan recently wrote, the Federal Trade Commission has the authority to ban the surveillance advertising model that these companies rely on, and “prevent corporations, big and small, from tracking our online and offline activities in an effort to ‘target’ advertising based on our non-public activities, speech, and thoughts.” Currently, the FTC is exploring rules to potentially prohibit this type of mass surveillance as an unfair method of competition. A ruling in this direction would force companies to create new and less harmful ways to make their platforms appealing to the public. Merger enforcement is another tool that law enforcers can use to limit the value of personal data in ways that reduce the incentive to build surveillance platforms. As Open Markets has previously reported, to prevent conflicts of interest and self-dealing practices that fortify monopolies, we can enforce structural separations between adjacent lines of businesses, such as prohibiting a single corporation from being simultaneously a publisher, an advertiser, a marketer, a data broker, and the owner of key communications infrastructures. Under our current ways of structuring digital markets, even if TikTok were to spin off from ByteDance, it will continue to compete under the same terms that allowed bigger social media platforms to put profit first over Americans’ privacy and a stronger democracy.
Open Markets Institute policy director Phillip Longman appears prominently in a documentary film called American Hospitals: Healing a Broken System, which debuted in Washington D.C. this week. Longman explains how hospitals that were originally chartered as non-profit, charitable institutions have too often evolved into predatory monopolies that focus on high-margin treatments for the affluent while ignoring the larger needs of their communities. The film is based in part on a July 2020 investigation published in the Washington Monthly by Longman and former Open Markets colleague Udit Thakur. 📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
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We appreciate your readership. Please consider making a contribution to support the continued publication of this newsletter. 📈 VITAL STAT:70%The share of the marketplace controlled by the country’s three largest pharmacy benefit managers, who negotiate manufacturer rebates on behalf of health insurance companies and determine reimbursements to pharmacies. The Ohio attorney general’s office has filed an antitrust suit against one of the three, Express Scripts. (ABC) 📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:“How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms.” (W.W. Norton, Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones). What is data and how does it arrange the algorithmically mediated world we live in? In this new book, the authors trace the evolution of data from the 18th century to the development of Google search, and show how data can be used in ways that we, the people, intentionally choose. 🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS? We would love to hear from you—just reply to this e-mail and drop us a line. Give us your feedback, alert us to competition policy news, or let us know your favorite story from this issue. |