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The cascade of political probes targeting the four largest companies in the technology sector gives the impression that this happened suddenly.
But Washington's increased focus on Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple over the past week is the natural climax of a relationship between technology and society that has deteriorated over the past two decades. last years.
That is why recent reports according to which the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission divide responsibilities for possible action against the big four – and that legislators had begun a general investigation of companies like Facebook and Google – seemed both abrupt and long in coming.
Why now?
Part of the answer seems to be that beating Silicon Valley is suddenly a good policy.
It took the sub-prime crisis on Wall Street to urge Congress to pass the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to reform the functioning of our country's financial system. And it was only after the Watergate scandal that Washington created the Federal Election Commission to regulate the campaign finance law more closely. In relation to these scandals, the decisive event for the imminent regulatory calculation of Silicon Valley is a less sudden discovery and a slow transformation of American political beliefs.
Take the Harris poll, which examines the reputation of American companies with Americans. Google's reputation has dropped 13 points in Harris' latest poll released in 2019, one of the most hasty setbacks in the survey. One of the few companies to have suffered more damage to the reputation? Facebook, which has dropped 43 places on the list of 100 companies, is as popular – or unpopular, depending on your point of view – as other scandal-ridden companies, such as Wells Fargo and the Trump organization.
And when you dive into other surveys, you will find that Google and Facebook reviews are surprisingly bipartite.
Polls show that Facebook's favors have plummeted from the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018, largely due to democratic democrats and independents who have decided not to have a positive impression on the social media giant. . Google, Amazon and Apple have also seen their favorability rating fall during this period, but not as strongly.
While conservatives usually celebrate big business, Republican critics of the Silicon Valley giants focus on accusations of political bias on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The Conservatives have been harassing technology leaders at Capitol Hill on these issues, which they categorically deny.
And Trump gave oxygen to these claims of anti-conservative bias; This month, for example, the White House has launched a new tool allowing its supporters to report censorship allegedly exercised by social media companies.
"Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned or fraudulently reported for unclear" violations "of user policies," the White House said on the tool's website. "Whatever your point of view, if you think political acts have been committed against you, share your story with President Trump."
But, as polls show, it's the democrats' shift in technology that has led the charge. The Democrats, once the party of modern progressivism in Silicon Valley, now seem simply exhausted by its excesses. Despite the technology industry's continuing tendency to make their platforms apolitical, progressives are less and less satisfied with each new revelation of electoral interference, with each new leak of data and every new report of extremist views propagating on these sites. .
Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the biggest candidates for the Democratic presidency, has decided to break the hearts of technology giants in her offer. This forced a broader conversation about their power, with everyone, from former Vice President Joe Biden to Senator Bernie Sanders, participating in this new litmus test.
The offensive technology policy, however, is not obvious to the Democratic Party even in 2019. Not a single candidate for the Democratic presidency beyond Warren has celebrated new investigative reports – and the two dozen candidates refused or did not answer when asked to share a new reaction with Recode. A large part of the Democratic establishment, with the exception of Warren and Sanders, still needs to attract the favors of Silicon Valley, especially to reap the riches of its fundraising – the setting up a walk on the steep path.
But it is a Democrat, Representative David Cicilline (RI), who is leading a new "top-down" investigation into the anticompetitive power of technology. In the announcement of the probe Monday, Cicilline said that "Internet is broken." This language would be foreign to the Democratic Party of Barack Obama before 2016.
"In many ways, the early days of the Internet were reluctant to intervene," said Cicilline, according to the Washington Post. "It created so much value in people's lives that [some felt] you should stray from the path and allow it to flourish.
"Over time," said Cicilline, "people have recognized that there are real dangers here."
While many political reviews have been devoted to data entry giants such as Facebook and Google, other tech giants have succumbed to more general political antipathy towards their sector.
Amazon, increasingly targeted by complaints that its market is anti-competitive and that it outsources and overloads its employees, appears to be under control of the Federal Trade Commission. Even though it still offers a very popular product and that it has not had any ulcer-inducing scandals that Facebook has been confronting over the past year, it has become a bag for the two liberal activists who denounce his arrogance and for Trump supporters who see the CEO of Amazon. and Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, as the enemy.
Apple has largely escaped the same tightening of the noose. In fact, the CEO, Tim Cook, has sometimes tried to dissuade Apple from struggling with the difficulties faced by other companies in the technology sector, for example by using Facebook as an idiot to demonstrate how much his company took privacy seriously. But he too should prepare for a difficult month, in the light of reports that the US Justice Department is planning to conduct its own inquiry into society. Competitors like Spotify have attacked the company for its own anti-competitive power, and some application developers said Tuesday that they were filing their own suit against Apple for similar reasons.
"With size, I think control is right. I think we should be monitored, "Cook said Tuesday, during an interview with CBS. "I do not think any reasonable person can come to the conclusion that Apple is a monopoly."
It is important to keep in mind that the fact that the executive branch is preparing to take action does not necessarily mean that the biggest companies in the technology sector will have real consequences. And the news that the DOJ and the FTC divide jurisdiction over these companies does not mean that official investigations will be launched. It does not mean that real penalties will be imposed. This is at least a factor in the congressional announcement of its own antitrust investigation.
"I do not really believe that these agencies will do the work," Cicilline said Monday.
But even if it's a purely political exercise, these tech giants are political beasts that must remain in the good graces of the American political establishment. And by 2019, this should be tested.
Recode and Vox have joined forces to discover and explain how our digital world is changing – and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough discussions that the technology industry needs today.
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