In 2019 during her campaign to become the Democrat nominee for President, Sen. Elizabeth Warren promised to use the antitrust laws to reverse “illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers.” As examples, she cited Amazon’s merger with Whole Foods, Facebook’s merger with Instagram, and Google’s merger with DoubleClick. “To restore the balance of power in our democracy,” she wrote, “to promote competition, and to ensure that the next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last, it’s time to break up our biggest technology companies.”
More recently, Sen. Ted Cruz has claimed that Big Tech is censoring conservative content. “Big Tech is out of control,” he said, “filled with hubris and flagrantly silencing those with whom they disagree…. These actions don’t just threaten our First Amendment rights and free speech. They threaten the integrity of our elections and the future of our democracy.” He has implied that the government use antitrust laws to break up Big Tech in order to foster free speech.
When an unabashed Progressive like Warren and a staunch conservative like Cruz agree on an issue, one might be inclined to think that we have entered the Twilight Zone. But this isn’t an eerie tale from Rod Serling. It is a real, bi-partisan campaign against some of the nation’s largest and most successful technology companies.
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