After all the investigations into whether Russia interfered in our elections and whether the ads Russia posted on Facebook had any effect, a much deeper question just emerged: If Facebook can influence an election, isn’t this a matter of equal concern? what external influences? And what about Google and other popular online companies? Can they also influence public attitudes?
In June 2019, Google had 88% of the US search engine market share. Yahoo came in not even a close second with about 6.45 percent.
Microsoft’s Bing had a 4.1 percent share.
Facebook had 52% of the US social media market share as of December 2018. Its closest competitor, Pinterest, had just 28%.
The enormous potential of online services to influence the public is quite disturbing. But when you add to that the well-known fact that many of these services are left-leaning, it becomes downright unsettling.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, “Congress passed the first antitrust law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, as a ‘comprehensive charter of economic freedom designed to preserve free and unrestricted competition as the rule of commerce.'”
The purpose of the antitrust laws is to “protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers by ensuring that there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently… The Sherman Act prohibits any monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize.” ‘”
In the past, the monopolization of a market was often the result of the merger of large companies or the fixing of prices by several companies. And in some cases it would take more than one generation.
In 1974, the United States Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T, which was the sole provider of telephone service in most of the United States, and most of the telephone equipment in the United States was produced by AT&T. subsidiary, Western Electric. As a result of the lawsuit, AT&T was divided into more than one company.
In today’s cyber world, a company becomes a giant in less than a generation. And while they may not necessarily have profited as much from unfair competition, there are some well-known cases of these companies (Facebook and Google, among them) having political biases that lead people to their point of view. This in itself may not be illegal. But when a company is so huge in size, this should be cause for concern.
If we have laws that protect fair competition, shouldn’t we have laws that protect the most important aspect of a free society: fair elections?
What’s more, these huge online services also have the power to put people out of work or out of business. All they have to do is close the account of someone who may have millions of customers or followers; this would put this company or person out of business and cause their competitors to move up a notch, or maybe even to the top. And there are very few legal recourses for a business or individual who has been wrongfully shut down.
These large online companies currently operate with almost no government oversight. Such unprecedented power needs to be closely regulated. Ideally, companies of the size and influence of Google and Facebook should be broken up into smaller companies, each serving smaller sections of the US necessarily being their highest priority.