Will the Government Get Tough on Big Tech?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (which owns Google), and Facebook—known in the tech world as the Big Four—are among the largest and most profitable companies in the world, and they’ve been accustomed to the laxest of oversight from Washington. But the climate may have shifted in a significant way. The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the House Judiciary Committee are all investigating different aspects of the Big Four; Elizabeth Warren has made breaking up these companies a cornerstone of her Presidential campaign. Sue Halpern, a New Yorker contributor, sounds a cautious note about these developments. Current antitrust law doesn’t well fit the nature of these businesses, and breaking up the companies will not necessarily solve underlying issues, like the lack of privacy law. In a twist, Halpern says, the Big Four and now asking the federal government for more regulation—because, she explains to David Remnick, the companies’ lobbyists can sway Washington more easily than they can influence state governments like California, which just passed a rigorous data-privacy law similar to the European Union’s. “They’re being called to account, they have to do something,” she notes, “but they want to direct the conversation so that, ultimately, they still win.” Plus, we contemplate the dire prospect of Houston without air conditioning. Bryan Washington, a Houston native and a celebrated young fiction writer, introduces non-natives to a cherished local institution: the open-air bar and community space called an ice house.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One thing is pretty clear in this world.
0:14.8	If you can get Elizabeth Warren and Steve Bannon to agree on something, and the something is that you're doing a lousy job and you
0:21.6	can't be trusted. That's kind of a feat. And that's where the big four tech companies are right now.
0:28.0	Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are among the biggest and most profitable companies in the world,
0:34.3	and they've been accustomed to having their way in Washington for a very
0:37.7	long time. But maybe not anymore. The Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission,
0:43.7	and Congress are all investigating the tech giants, and there's now talk that antitrust laws
0:48.9	could be applied to break them up. Elizabeth Warren has actually made that a cornerstone of her campaign.
0:55.0	They think they can run their business to just roll right over every small business, every
1:04.0	entrepreneur, every startup that might threaten their position. It is time to break up America's tech giants.
1:14.2	I asked Sue Halpern, who reports for us on technology and politics,
1:18.2	whether Washington is finally changing its tune.
1:21.5	Basically, we've got a situation in which the tech giants have done a number of things that are wrong and creepy,
1:31.5	the last of which was the Nancy Pelosi fake video that made her look like a drunken fool.
1:38.0	And then he had a press conference in the Rose Garden with all this short sort of visuals that obviously were planned
1:48.5	long before I said most currently that he was engaged in a cover-up.
1:55.0	And the response in that case of Facebook was, oh, sorry, let's move on.
2:00.7	When the Pelosi video was not taken down, one of the things of Facebook was, oh, sorry, let's move on. When the Pelosi video was not taken down,
2:04.0	one of the things that Facebook said was, well, we don't have a rule that says everything on our
2:08.1	platform has to be true. And so there's been a lot of talk among constituents, among politicians,
2:15.7	that this has got to stop. Sue So what would have to happen for Congress
	...

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