Big Tech companies thrive because consumers can’t quit them – Washington Examiner

Big Tech's dominance within the social, political, and economic spheres of life is not going unnoticed; reining it in has become a bipartisan aim, even if for competing reasons.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri argues that Facebook and Twitter are censorious. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota suggests that they are not censorious enough. In any case, both think Congress should do something.

Big Tech holds the keys to the kingdom of online life. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple had a combined valuation of more than $5 trillion as of September 2020, according to an October report from the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, accounting for more than one-third of the value of the S&P 100.

But the people and businesses whom politicians want to protect from Big Tech are the very ones who made Big Tech into what it is. Jeff Bezos became the worlds richest man because everybody wanted (and still wants) to use what he created for everything. Big Techs ascendancy is less a story about corporate formation than it is about the extraordinary evolution of the average persons social and commercial habits.

Hawley said in an October statement, Google and its fellow Big Tech monopolists exercise unprecedented power over the lives of ordinary Americans, controlling everything from the news we read to the security of our most personal information. Yet getting news from Google and Facebook is not a requirement it is a choice.

Consider this: After a New York Times opinion writer wrote a stupid joke on Twitter calling for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote that the social and work-related costs of tweeting arent balanced by the benefits, and at this point the majority of Twitter users I know seem to agree. She added, They hate what Twitter does to their organizations and friends, they hate the pervasive fear, and so on.

Yet, she couldnt help but stay on either: Im just as guilty as anyone ... because I dont have the fortitude to quit.

As McArdle acknowledged, People feel they have to stay on because others do, and others are on for the same reason. That peer pressure is bad for all the reasons McArdle named, but it is great for Twitter.

In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, Republican Sen. Rand Paul took on the idea of the government disrupting or breaking up these large tech companies. Dont use em. Youre a big boy, he said. Quit using Twitter. Quit using Facebook.

Its very much a party of personal responsibility argument, but Paul recognizes that Big Tech companies have so much commanding influence because consumers have so freely and so widely associated with it, even to a point of developing dependencies.

If Big Tech, with all its current momentum and market share, was poised to bring about a dystopian future, it would be Huxley, not Orwell, who would be vindicated.

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Big Tech companies thrive because consumers can't quit them - Washington Examiner