Circa 1996, U.S. lawmakers wanted to make sure scrappy startups, like AOL and Amazon, had a fighting chance against incumbents. Our government had a straightforward approach: rubberstamp mergers and free tech from any regulatory oversight. These policy approaches were intended to level the playing field for the nascent tech industry and export our values abroad.
And it worked! But only in part. Our tech policies of yore have turned those startups into the world’s first set of trillion-dollar companies. But Big Tech failed to export our values — and has even been counterproductive on that end.
Big Tech’s engagement with China is a case in point.
Big Tech has set aside American values to profit off China. Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China, for example, have contributed to the ongoing enslavement of Uyghurs — a religious minority — In the country.
And Big Tech has helped the Chinese government firm up its own anti-American sentiments. Apple has a multi-billion-dollar deal that gives the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a back channel to all Apple devices located on the mainland.
Apple’s deal with China requires it to take down apps that promote anti-CCP narratives, including those celebrating the Tiananmen Square demonstration and calling for independence for Tibet and Taiwan.
Big Tech has even exported CCP values into the United States. Google demonetizes YouTube videos in the U.S. that offend the CCP. Amazon partnered with China’s propaganda arm "to create a selling portal on the company’s U.S. site, Amazon.com – a project that came to be known as China Books."
Apple still lists TikTok as an "essential app" for its users even with the Treasury Department investigating the app on national security grounds, the Department of Justice investigating the company for spying on American journalists, and the director of the FBI and President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence raising issues with the app’s relationship with the CCP.
Back in America, our laissez-faire approach has encouraged Big Tech companies to take centralized control over our information, personal data and our markets. These companies are so dominant that they can buy out any competitor that drives away revenue from them, with the federal government green lighting nearly every acquisition Big Tech wants. Since 2000, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple collectively acquired over 800 companies.
What may be worse, Big Tech uses centralized control to kill new startups, force acquisitions, or just flat-out steal their competitors’ functions through their app stores. And to "connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content."
The firms also totally control digital ad markets to arbitrarily inflate the cost of digital ads. In short, they get richer while you pay more for products online.
Last Congress, a bipartisan chorus of Senators and Representatives proposed bills to curb the effects of Big Tech’s centralized control by reforming our antitrust laws, protecting our children and creating a national privacy regime.
Not one significant reform passed. Why not?
One theory is that Big Tech simply outspends their opposition’s lobbying effort. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
The reason is far more entrenched — our tech policies have evolved from nurturing startups to institutionalizing Big Tech incumbents as our national champions.
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Sadly, our government still thinks these companies will help us fight against China, even though they kowtow to the CCP at almost every chance and consistently invoke policies that suppress our core values domestically, like freedom of speech, religion or association.
Frankly, these facts should call into question whether Big Tech even shares American values at all.
It is even more imperative to get this right as our nation decides how to deal with artificial intelligence. It’s no secret that the Chinese government wants to militarize its own AI capabilities; we are shaping up to be on the losing end of that digital arms race if we don’t get serious.
As it stands now, the AI market is concentrated among a few companies, dominated by Big Tech. Worse, almost all have significant ties to China and its government.
Our national security and individual liberty demand that Congress tackle AI with a clear sight of who these companies are and the values they hold — based not only on their words but their actions.
The reality is that Big Tech firms are not our champions, and our policies should stop treating them as such. Instead, we should treat them like the multinational corporations that they are. Let’s start by passing meaningful, bipartisan reforms to protect our consumers, our children, and — let’s face it — our national security.
