The Heritage Foundation, America’s most prominent conservative think tank, recently published Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map by research fellow Kara Frederick. The ambitious paper outlines complaints against “Big Tech” and proposes policy responses ranging from antitrust reform to amending Section 230. Amid ongoing debates on antitrust, free speech, and surveillance, research from a conservative perspective on these issues would be valuable. Unfortunately, rather than providing clear analysis, Frederick’s paper is marked by imprecision, factual errors, and vague political rhetoric. The most substantive recommendations ultimately represent a retreat from long‐established conservative policy principles consistent with a free economy and free society.
Complaints and Definitions
Almost half of the paper is a catalog of anecdotal complaints against “Big Tech.” Although mentioned in the title and used throughout the paper, “Big Tech” is defined in a vague way, as “a loose compilation of companies that include the “Big Five” tech companies—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft—along with other tech companies like Twitter, TikTok, Snap, and Netflix whose cultural and political impacts on public debate are significant.”
This vagueness makes addressing the paper a challenge. The term “Big Tech” includes Twitter, which looks like a very small fish in a sea where the Amazon, Google and Facebook leviathans swim. Only a minority of Americans are active Twitter users and, unlike Facebook and Google, Twitter is not competing in markets as diverse as those for smart speakers, e‑commerce, and cloud gaming. While it might be true that Twitter has a significant impact on culture and politics along the Acela Express route, most Americans debate these issues without Twitter accounts.
The inclusion of Netflix is likewise bizarre. The company undoubtedly affects culture, but it is not a monopoly streaming service. Disney owns the intellectual property associated with its classic animated movies as well as Star Wars and Marvel, arguably among the most culturally influential fictional universes in living memory. Disney’s broader streaming service has almost 120 million subscribers, while Hulu, also owned by Disney, has a little more than 40 million subscribers. Yet Disney is not included is Frederick’s definition, and nor is Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world that has a clear influence on our contemporary discourse.
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