In America's current political climate, there are a vanishingly small number of issues on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress can make common cause. But if there is one area of policy where the political willpower exists for significant bipartisan legislation, that area is without a doubt Big Tech. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly railed against the oligopolistic tendencies of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, arguing that all four behemoths violate antitrust laws designed to promote competition and protect consumers from being exploited. This shared grievance has brought together some of the most unlikely allies in Congress who can, at the very least, agree that too few companies in the tech world have too much power.
One reason these odd alliances have materialized is because Big Tech does not map squarely onto traditional left-and-right lines. The technologies that undergird Big Tech, such as cloud-computing and algorithmic sorting, are nearly impossible for the average person to understand, leaving lawmakers with very little material to push a clear political agenda. Some conservatives have dubiously alleged that Big Tech "censors" right-wing voices. But even then, there is significant disagreement amongst Republicans around whether the problem of "censorship" would be actually remedied by heightened antitrust laws.
This point was brought into sharp relief on Tuesday in a Fox News op-ed published by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a libertarian conservative known for his relatively unorthodox political views. In it, Paul casts doubt over the economic prudence of breaking up the Big Four and calls on his fellow Republicans to stand by the free-market ideals that the party is known for....
