By Hunter Wallace | 18 February 2021
OCCIDENTAL DISSENT — I’ve already stated my view of Big Tech.
Destroying Big Tech is now our top public policy priority.
“Americans’ perceptions of big tech companies have steadily deteriorated over the past 18 months as titans like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon receive an avalanche of bipartisan criticism, according to a new poll.
A new Gallup poll released Thursday shows that 45 percent of those surveyed have “somewhat” or “very” negative views of large tech companies, which were defined in the survey as firms “such as Amazon, Facebook and Google.”
The percent of respondents who had “somewhat” negative views remained the same from when the poll was taken in August 2019 — 23 percent — but the percentage of those with “very” negative views jumped from 10 percent to 22 percent. …
Changes in public opinion of the tech titans are particularly stark among Republicans and independents. The percentage of self-identified Republicans polled who had positive views of the firms fell from 43 percent to 20 percent, while support from independents in the survey fell from 43 percent to 33 percent. Positive views among Democratic respondents held steady at 49 percent.
Support for increased regulation is bipartisan, with majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats backing boosted oversight. In 2019, fewer than 50 percent of Republicans and independents polled supported more regulation. …”
In the span of eight months, the censorship has swung Big Tech’s image from +6 to -45 among Republicans and +10 to -11 among Indies. The elite cabal in Silicon Valley rigged the internet against Trump and threw off the veil when they banned him from social media. […]
>Destroying Big Tech is now our top public policy priority.
So how does Hunter Wallace (or Brad Griffin, whatever his name is) aka the Pillsbury Doughboy, want to go about ‘destroying big tech’? — he does offer a couple of good measures:
>Using antitrust to break up these corporations like AT&T
>Killing the cheap labor supply by drying up guest worker programs
The others don’t appeal to me nearly as much, and the second one I list does not go nearly far enough: supposedly temporary (3 years), and renewable only once, H-1B has long been a ticket to a green card, and then citizenship; all of that must stop and be reversed — more than anything, H-1B is very damaging to the job prospects of (real) Americans, and no doubt turns off many who would otherwise be interested in engineering — it’s also a vehicle for age discrimination, which is really a silent scandal in the tech industry.
Previously I offered a concrete suggestion for the first measure: force Google to divest YouTube — the financial resources of Google, which buys server power, gives YT a real advantage against other streaming video providers — it is widely rumored that YT is not a profitable business (Google does not separately report YT results) — forcing YT to exist as a separate company would subject it to a LOT of business/market pressure, which may cause it to change its behavior re censorship.
Personally I never understood the general emphasis on repealing §230 — getting rid of §230(1) would probably lead to more censorship as platforms seek to reduce their potential liability — so §230(2) is what’s meant, and there it may help to remove a platform’s liability protection when censoring content they deem to have violated their fully arbitrary ToS (due to fear of class action) — this may end up at SCOTUS, i.e. for something similar to an obscenity ruling: what is/is not protected speech on a platform from a 1st Amendment perspective — the latter/1st Amendment approach seems the most traditional and promising.
But having to resort to this to regain the ability to speak freely, something that was always taken for granted in America, means a lot has already been lost: the commitment to adhere to the spirit of the 1st Amendment, without having to litigate the letter of it.