Posted on 06/22/2020 2:08:25 PM PDT by Kaslin
Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn penned a letter to Attorney General William Barr Monday urging the Department of Justice to conduct a thorough antitrust investigation into Google’s monopolistic power over the internet after the tech giant’s recent attack on The Federalist.
“As your antitrust investigation of Google intensified, I urge you to thoroughly scrutinize how the company’s anticompetitive practices could lead to the crippling of journalistic freedom,” Blackburn wrote. “I also ask that your probe examine abuses in both the online advertising and online search markets, and to take enforcement action swiftly before further economic harm results.”
The letter comes just less than a week after Google threatened to ban The Federalist from profiting on the search engine’s ad revenue based on an NBC report compiled with a foreign left-wing think tank charging Federalist reporting with violating Google’s terms of service. The reporting in question, while not publicly known, likely centers on a piece from Federalist Political Editor John Davidson exposing the legacy media’s dishonest coverage of recent riots engulfing the nation. NBC’s “Verification Unit,” in collusion with the United Kingdom’s “Center for Countering Digital Hate” claimed that Federalist journalism was racially insensitive.
Google later released a statement on the same day NBC News broke the story that The Federalist had been demonetized, clarifying that no action had been taken against the conservative website and instead merely threatened sanctions not for its published content but for information in its comment section which have since been temporarily disabled. Federalist executives have pledged however, that the comment section will come back. Meanwhile, Google-owned YouTube’s infamous comment sections well-known for nefarious content have continued to operate uncensored.
Blackburn, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Tech Task Force praised Barr’s move to ramp up DOJ efforts to curb liability protections to the Silicon Valley tech giants provided in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act in light of Google’s most recent episode of selective censorship but pushed the Justice Department to do more. A Daily Caller analysis of the Justice Department’s current probe into Google published Sunday shows that federal investigators appear to be ignoring bias claims in Google’s search algorithms even as its search engine dominates roughly 90 percent of the entire internet.
“They are not an infant business,” Blackburn said, arguing they no longer need broad government protections. “They are some of the biggest corporations in this country, and they should not be given protections that other businesses or private citizens are not given.”
It’s long past time the internet giants were subjected to the kind of antitrust scrutiny received by AT&T, IBM, Microsoft and Intel.
Absolutely. I am also getting tired of the liberal news, liberal personal interest stories, attacks on conservatives and trashy media people flashing on my search page. Nothing but sleaze. I was using startpage but for some reason had problems.
They should have done this years ago. Trump should use an EO to immediately revoke the Tech protections and let them start fighting lawsuits every time they stifle a Conservative.
2. YouTube unsubscribes users without their permission claiming that it is only trying to unsubscribe robots or fake accounts.
3. YouTube cancels notifications so that subscribers don't receive notice of new content.
4. YouTube accepts copyright strikes on channels from suspect users and makes it very difficult for a user to cancel a strike.
5. YouTube doesn't support fair use unless the accounts are owned by their favored content providers, e.g. CNN, NBC, etc.
6. YouTube selectively enforces its terms of service
For those libertarians that still think private companies should be able to do whatever the heck they want, they should at least know the full extent of the underhanded tactics that are used by the corporations they tacitly support.
Good!!! BREAK THEM UP! They pose a threat to democracy, to elections, to the first amendment, to everyone’s right to live their lives in pursuit of happiness and not worried about being fired. Break em the hell up. And yes, I am a free market believer. Just not free markets for some. The free market is not a suicide pact.
Yesterday I showed my wife the difference between a Google search and Duckduckgo search. She started playing with it this morning and was amazed to see what Google had throttled out of full and open results.
...and the oil companies, and the railroads...
Barr hasn't shown me much at all.
As am I.
For example, the statement "let peaceful people cross borders freely." The catch is that if all people can cross borders freely, how will the unpeaceful people be prevented from crossing the border? And the big one for me personally, the platform plank prohibition of the initiation of force.
No individual, group, or government may rightly initiate force against any other individual, group, or government.The deal breaker for me was those in the Libertarian Party that saw 9/11 attacks by Islam as initiation of force (thus requiring a principled libertarian response from US), and those that thought the use of force by Islam was valid retaliation for prior transgressions by the U.S. (Paulists, etc.). You can see where the recruitment from opposite political ideologies cause a schizophrenic member base.
There is a reason that every Libertarian Party vote must include "None of the Above" and that many libertarians do not vote at all in any elections as that would give tacit approval and support to the possible winner they don't approve of. That's also why a Libertarian Party Convention is a real zoo, but still fun to watch at least once in your life.
I think you know this, but I thought I'd put this out there for others to get some background since you mentioned the "l" word.
We should all remember and realize that Hitler probably would have been nothing without Dr. Goebbels to spread his evil lies.
L8r
- As you hinted at there are right and left libertarians. Noam Chomsky claims to be a left libertarian. Who on FR would want to be in his political company?
- Libertarians tend to be agnostic or atheistic folks that value facts, reason, and science. However, one thing that science teaches us is that humans evolved to survive and thrive by being both competitive and cooperative, by valuing both individualism and community spirit. This is a balancing act that libertarians fall far too much on one side of to be scientific.
- Libertarians appears to be even more utopian than Marxists. It is apparent to all but the most ideological that humans do not want to live in a Libertarian or Marxian world. However, at least Marxists believe that maybe we could train people to want a Marxian lifestyle if we force them into reeducation camps. Libertarians seem to believe that if we all put a Krugerand under our pillow at night that the Libertarian Fairy will come by and make us all want to live the life of highly energetic and driven entrepreneurs.
- There really is no sound libertarian position with regard to children. Are they the property of the parents that birth them or are they their own free individuals? At what point does the child's right to decide for himself trump the parents' desire to raise their kids the "right" way? There is an essay by Ed Feser regarding this question where he tries to make some headway. However, he has gone from being a libertarian to a conservative Catholic so this essay might have been one of the reasons he abandoned the "libertarian faith".
- Libertarians claim that because pretty much everything they believe in follows from the "Non-Aggression Principle" and that if everyone just understood "Economics 101" they would realize how simple life would be under libertarianism. However, just because a rule can be stated simply, doesn't mean the result is simple. Conway's Game of Life, Chess, Prime Numbers, Fibonacci Numbers, etc. These are all things that can be stated simply but that result in extremely complex and unpredictable results. For example, open borders + welfare, although being half of what most libertarians want, is actually worse than closed borders + welfare.
She and Josh Hawley were two excellent additions to the Senate in the last cycle. I really wish we’d been able to take out Tester as well.
Yep. Alphabet is the worst but Facebook and Twitter need to have antitrust actions brought against them as well. They are illegal monopolies. Break them up.
At absolute bare minimum, if they are not broken up, they need to be regulated like utilities - ie no viewpoint discrimination at all. No so-called “hate speech” code or bans, shadow bans, demonitization, etc etc
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