Platforms

YouTube said it will remove false videos alleging that major events like the Holocaust didn’t happen, as well as a broad array of content by white supremacists and others in a move to more aggressively crack down on hate speech.

If any of the tech giants are found guilty of anticompetitive behavior, they’re likely to be hit with heavy fines and other sanctions. But trying to force through a breakup of one or more of the companies will be tough to do because:

1. Big tech firms have generally made their services available for free.
2. They aren’t “natural monopolies.” 
3. Big tech firms dominate data gathering and use insights to provide even more free services.

The "Internet is broken." That, according to Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), is the sentiment animating a bipartisan antitrust review of technology titans in the House of Representatives. He is right to initiate the effort. But exploring the particulars of so sweeping a contention may take years. Meanwhile, there’s one broken thing Congress already knows it has to fix. A small group of companies has substantial control over a massive part of American life. This control has come with costs, from the flourishing of online disinformation to a flood of security breaches.

Democratic Reps plan a sweeping review of Facebook, Google and other technology giants to determine if they’ve become so large and powerful that they stifle competition and harm consumers, marking a new, unprecedented antitrust threat for an industry that’s increasingly under siege by Congress, the White House and 2020 presidential candidates.

Google and Amazon have thrived as American regulators largely kept their distance. That may be changing. Politicians on the right and left are decrying the tech companies’ enormous power. President Donald Trump (R-NY) and other Republicans have taken swipes at Amazon over taxes and at Google over search results they say are biased.

Today's tech giants achieved success and scale by promoting their openness, but the industry's open doors are shutting, one by one. Today's dominant tech platforms are privately owned and governed, and their owners will readily adjust the "openness" dial to suit their needs — booting users perceived to be undesirable, blocking competitors, and locking down key data structures (like Facebook's "social graph") to prevent users from choosing alternatives.

President Trump's tweets don't pack the punch they did at the outset of his presidency. His Twitter interaction rate — a measure of the impact given how much he tweets and how many people follow him — has tumbled precipitously. It's a sign that his strongest communication tool may be losing its effectiveness and that the novelty has worn off. 

Busting up the nation’s tech giants would be much harder than making a campaign pledge. Corporate breakups are a huge, and rare, undertaking for the government, and a social media company like Facebook presents unique challenges that didn't exist with past antitrust successes like the dismembering of AT&T in the 1980s. Here are some of the obstacles standing in the way of turning this rallying cry into reality:

A growing tech-skeptic chorus is drawing attention to the ways in which information technology disrupts democracy. No country is immune. With a better understanding of the principles undergirding both foreign and domestic responses to the threats posed by big tech, each subsequent section in this paper will lay out the specific dimensions of the political and economic problems that have arisen in the digital age, the policy responses and proposals pursued abroad, and the ideas guiding debate in the US.

Parler, a Twitter-like platform, was initially hatched in 2018 as a tool for digital news outlets to claw revenue back from big social networks like Facebook.