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Republicans in Congress claim they are outraged after Facebook and Twitter worked to suppress the New York Post’s bombshell story exposing Hunter and Joe Biden’s lies about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine and China. But the majority of them are faking it. Republicans have had years and countless opportunities to put real pressure on Big Tech. Even at this very moment, Republicans are refusing to take actions that would protect Americans from the predatory global tech elite.

As they have for more than a decade, Congressional Republicans are using Twitter as a smokescreen, a substitute for real action. Immediately after Facebook and Twitter’s censorship stunt, dozens of them made energetic tweets denouncing big tech and vowing to bring them in line.

For the vast majority of Republican lawmakers making strident attacks on tech over the past few days, this anger was phony. Republicans have spent years feigning outrage to get votes while doing nothing of importance in Washington. That is why politicians must be judged by their actions. And right now, Republicans’ actions on tech show them to be completely in thrall to a cabal of tech giants who hate them and hate their voters.

For two years, Republicans had unified control of Congress and the presidency. For two years, they had absolute freedom of action to curb big tech’s power. Instead, they did nothing. They didn’t pass legislation to break up tech monopolies. They didn’t move to protect free speech. They didn’t threaten to cut off tech’s endless importation of helot laborers through the H-1B program.

It wasn’t because the danger was unclear. Big tech was openly discussing means of controlling “fake news” just days after the 2016 election. In 2017, the firing of James Damore for a memo criticizing Google’s diversity policies showed how far-left the zeitgeist was inside tech companies.

Even now, all signs indicate that Republicans plan more of the same. On Thursday, Republicans voted to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz bragged about the coming testimony:

Subpoenas are the perfect political tactic for the modern Republican Party. They allow lawmakers to spend time on camera, looking tough and landing rhetorical blows on powerful people, before hopping onto Fox News to hog even more attention. But that’s it. Questioning tech leaders doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t change laws, it doesn’t break up monopolies, it doesn’t restore rights that Americans are rapidly losing to a cabal of amoral globalist oligarchs.

A web page for Senator Marsha Blackburn is a perfect example of Congress’ approach. She has a long list boasting of her efforts against big tech:

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Last year was a big year for online free speech advocacy:

  • In the Senate Judiciary Committee, we exposed how tech platforms censor speech they disagree with.
  • I met with the other members of the Senate Commerce Committee, where we recently discussed ways Big Tech can fight extremism online without resorting to unfair censorship tactics.

Big Tech’s era of unaccountability is over: 

  • We’re going to give Big Tech guide rails that will encourage innovation, while also making it clear that Congress will not tolerate policies that put speech and safety at risk.
  • The current 230 protections are too broad and ripe for abuse, but I have some ideas on how to get back on track.

In other words, Blackburn helped pass some law against human trafficking (a problem 99% of Americans are not affected by). Otherwise, she has had a lot of hearings and a lot of “ideas.” In other words, Blackburn is useless.

If Republicans were a real anti-big tech party, concerned more with Americans’ rights than donors’ dollars, here is what they would be doing right now and in the years to come:

1. Confirm President Trump’s FCC nominee

A month ago, the Trump administration nominated Nathan Simington for a five-year term on the Federal Communications Commission. If confirmed, Simington is on the commission for five years, even if Biden wins in a landslide on November 3.

Simington, as an appointee at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, helped draft the administration’s petition to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to curb the censorship power of social media behemoths. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai announced last week, in the wake of the Post’s censored Hunter Biden bombshell, that he is ready to move ahead in crafting new FCC rules.

To create any new rules protecting free speech, though, Pai needs an FCC majority, and that will only be possible if Simington is confirmed. Michael O’Rielly, the commissioner he is nominated to replace, has responded to censorship worries with clueless statements emphasizing Big Tech’s “First Amendment” right to suppress unwanted content, like articles that make Democrats look bad.

Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee finally announced a hearing for Simington, to be held after the election on November 10. The hearing, and a confirmation vote, should have happened much earlier. But they didn’t, in part because Republicans on the Commerce Committee have been dragging their feet instead of taking action. Sources tell Revolver that Senator Blackburn, seen above loudly bragging about her efforts to curb tech abuse, has been a roadblock to Simington’s nomination. That’s hardly a surprise. Confirming Simington would be an actual win, while Blackburn’s resume shows she overwhelmingly prefers fake victories.

2. Change the law on tech censorship.

But as welcome as Simington’s confirmation would be, the only reason the FCC is being used as a means to protect online free speech is because Congress itself has abdicated that role.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was never intended to give tech monopolies vast censorship power. It was intended to let websites remove egregiously offensive or criminal materials (such as child pornography) without losing their status as public platforms. Section 230 deserves to be revised, to more closely match the original intent.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has crafted legislation to modify Section 230. The bill would require companies to be more honest and transparent about their terms of service and pay fines if they break them. Hawley’s bill is welcome, and would be an improvement if passed, but Republicans should go much further. Major websites like Facebook or YouTube are not ordinary websites. Their size and ubiquity makes them comparable to utilities. They are the de facto public forums of the digital age. The law should preserve free speech on them in the same way speech is protected in the real-world public square. Congress should pass a law placing special free speech protections on any platforms of a sufficient size, while being more lenient on smaller platforms that serve a specific niche audience.

3. Pass a coronavirus relief package.

The devastating economic impact of coronavirus may seem unrelated to big tech censorship, but it isn’t. Big tech’s censorship power derives from how much power it has. And coronavirus shutdowns have vastly enhanced tech’s power and control over the economy. Thanks to coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions, tech’s real-world competitors have been forcibly shut down for months, and hundreds of thousands of them have gone out of business entirely. With Americans stuck inside and online we have become more dependent than ever on tech monopolies for our discourse and our shopping.

As ordinary American businesses die, Congress has done nothing. Since passing the first coronavirus relief package in March, businesses have continued to die and Americans have continued to go bankrupt thanks to Democratic lockdowns, but Republicans have ignored President Trump’s urgent calls for new stimulus. Just this week, Mitch McConnell nixed negotiations yet again, saying a $1.8 trillion package was off the table.

McConnell’s failure isn’t just deliberate sabotage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and a betrayal of ordinary Americans. It’s also a massive gift to rising tech powers that rule more and more of America.

4. Amend antitrust law to protect speech and break up tech giants.

The power of big tech comes overwhelmingly from the sheer size of the companies involved. Google has an effective monopoly not just on search, but also online advertising and video hosting. Facebook is the only social network of note, and Twitter dwarfs all competitors in microblogging. That’s precisely why these three companies holding censorship power matters so much. According to Pew, more than 40% of Americans get news via Facebook, while 21% use YouTube, and 12% use Twitter. The three dwarf all other online sources of news. And if they decide the public shouldn’t see a story, then a vast swath of the public never will.

How do you make big tech less powerful? A good start would be making it less big. Republicans should start fighting to break up the largest tech companies into more manageable pieces. One good start would be splitting Google’s search, advertising, and video divisions into separate companies.

This wouldn’t just be good policy. It would be great for the party’s electoral prospects. Breaking up Big Tech is overwhelmingly popular:

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that a large majority of voters across Senate battleground states agree that big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have grown too big and powerful, and the government needs to act now to rein in their power. A total of 84% of voters agree with this sentiment, with 53% strongly agreeing and 31% somewhat agreeing, with 7% who say they somewhat disagree and only 2% strongly disagreeing. 61% of voters say they would be more likely to vote for a Senator who voted to rein in the power of big tech companies, with thirty six percent saying they would be much more likely, and only 11% saying they would be less likely to vote for them.

…

74% of voters also say they support the federal government breaking up large technology companies to reduce their power and increase competition and innovation. [PublicPolicyPolling]

Republicans could also amend antitrust law to place an emphasis on protecting free speech. Right now, American antitrust law is built around stopping restraint of trade: If companies collude to suppress competition, or a single company grows too dominant, then the government steps in to punish them or break them up. But antitrust law can and should apply to conspiracies against Americans’ basic rights. Big Tech’s effort to shape the 2020 election is blatantly coordinated between the major companies. Republicans should be demanding severe, even catastrophic punishments for companies that engage in such behavior in the future.

5. Take action at the state level.

Despite President Trump’s best efforts to push the party in a winning direction, it’s entirely possible that Republicans will be thrashed in November’s election. If Republicans lose the Senate and White House, they obviously will have no chance of dictating tech policy at the national level for at least four years, and perhaps longer.

But even if 2020 is a disaster at the national level, Republicans will still retain control in many states. For years, the left has used the states as staging grounds for efforts at the national level. Conservatives and populists should do the same. One easy mechanism is through civil rights law. A Republican state could amend its civil rights laws to ban public-forum tech companies like Twitter or Facebook from discriminating against users based on constitutionally-protected speech. To give added teeth to the law, Republicans could allow private citizens to sue for damages. State law could also prohibit government contracts for companies that practice censorship.

Another weapon state-level Republicans could deploy is anti-fraud laws. Big tech is able to censor with tactics like retroactively changing terms of service, or simply enforcing those terms of service inconsistently or in bad faith. Right now, they simply get away with it. But even the smallest Republican state could classify that behavior as what it is: criminal fraud. Both citizens and the government could be empowered to seek real damages for such malicious behavior by tech companies, forcing them to respect the rights of Americans or else pay a steep financial penalty.

All of these steps are necessary if the Republican Party wants to genuinely fight for Americans rather than tech oligarchs. Right now, its leaders are doing nothing, which says everything about how useless and corrupt the current Republican Party of 2020 is. It must change course, immediately, and if it fails to do so, it deserves to be burned down and replaced.

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