Glenn Greenwald’s Testimony on Silicon Valley Monopoly Power

[Elderberry]

Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 3/13/2021

Glenn Greenwald appeared before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law yesterday on the threat big tech monopolies pose to free speech. Here’s his opening statement


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-CCjzULfyQ&t=2s

    Over the last several years, my journalistic interest in and concern about the dangers of Silicon Valley’s monopoly power has greatly intensified– particularly as wielded by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The dangers posed by their growing power manifest in multiple ways. But I am principally alarmed by the repressive effect on free discourse, a free press, and a free internet, all culminating in increasingly intrusive effects on the flow of information and ideas and an increasingly intolerable strain on a healthy democracy.

The three incidents he sites are the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the de-platforming of President Trump following the January 6 riot, and the abusive use of monopoly power to suppress Parler:

    Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years have heard the same refrain:if you don’t like how they are moderating content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old recognition that it is impossible,by definition, to effectively compete with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that alternative is.

    Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this argument from Silicon Valley’s defenders and took it seriously.They set out to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook — one which would provide far border free expression rights for users and, more importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create competitors to existing social media monopolies.

More: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=47573

[PeteS in CA]

It would be nice if political bogeymanizers painted with a less broad broom. In >>40 years of working in Silicon Valley tech companies I have never worked for one with the awesome monopoly powers indiscriminately ascribed to all Silicon Valley companies.