Monopoly Of The Woke

No, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not monopolies. They are hugely popular, at least for the moment, which gives rise to the appearance, if not the reality, that they own the new digital public square. The problem is that the square isn’t public, and it’s only the new public square because that’s where people hang out. Nobody forces people to go there. Nobody prevents people from going to the real public square. This is just what people choose to do.

And nobody elected Zuck, Jack or any other tech scion to be the defender of either free speech or protector from hate speech. To the extent they are, that’s their choice, whether because of their personal views or market conditions. You’re entitled to your views. They are too.

Arguments abound that these private enterprises are monopolies because they have enormous, too much, control over the digital village square and people’s ability to be heard. They are too popular. Too powerful. Too cavalier. Except that’s not what makes a company a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But this could be.

This week, British feminist blogger Kellie-Jay Keen received a surprise email from Zoom: “We’ve detected an issue with your account that violated our Terms of Service and Community Standards” regarding “hateful conduct.” The email primly informed her that “there is no place on Zoom” for anyone who threatens or harasses others on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease.

The dummy text concluded with an ominous warning likely to strike panic in any mother of school-age children: “Please note that further violations may result in the permanent suspension of your Zoom account.”

What was Keen’s “hateful conduct?” Zoom never said—as these tech companies rarely do. The purpose of the tech giants’ Star Chamber is not to inform, but to instill fear. To encourage self-censorship. To persuade you to reform yourself—so that the overlords have no cause to visit you once more.

Abigail Shrier likens Zoom to a telephone, a conduit through which something is transmitted. It hosts nothing. It’s just the tubes, where someone puts sound and images into one end and it comes out the other. What could it possibly know or care what that sound or image is? But if the sound or image offends someone, and they realize that it came to fruition with the use of Zoom, they can eradicate its existence by making Zoom’s complicity.

No, you’re saying to yourself right about now. That’s no different for Zoom than Facebook, both private companies making decisions about who they choose to service, as is their right. Yes, indeed, but we haven’t yet gotten to the crux of the problem.

But here’s the interesting thing about this latest Big Tech escalation of the censorship game: Zoom isn’t a content host. It’s more like a visual telephone that allows her to speak to her mother, who has been in isolation since the start of the pandemic, and friends she cannot visit in person. It permits her four children to attend school. It is arguably closer to a common carrier, like an airline, than a website—insofar as it transports us across the globe. If Netflix is like a movie theater, highly selective about which movies it shows, and YouTube is like public-access television, then Zoom is much closer to a telephone. It isn’t supposed to care about the content of our calls.

What’s next? Could Apple disable Keen’s iPhone’s operating system? Could Norton refuse virus protection for the troublemakers whose views don’t click into place? Is there never to be any recourse against Big Tech companies who have bought up all the real estate where our work occurs, the public spaces where we meet our friends, and who hold our most private and sensitive data? (Truly, the ability to blackmail any of us resides on their servers.) Build your own Zoom, is it?

It’s one thing to argue that Facebook can’t be forced to provide its service to anyone it doesn’t want to, but what happens when your kid can’t go to school because Zoom doesn’t like the curriculum. On the other hand, you won’t need Norton antivirus if no ISP will sell you internet access.

Another alarming story from this week: Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, a conservative exploration of the transgender movement. The hardback, the paperback, the audio and even the used copies sold through third parties suddenly disappeared from the “world’s largest bookstore.” That same day, Apple removed the two-year-old book from its own offerings. Also on that very day: Twitter determined that the book’s cover amounted to “offensive content.”

If Jeff Bezos said to himself, “damn, I don’t want to sell this book, and I don’t have to,” that would be his right. And Jack Dorsey came to the same conclusion as well on the same day, how fortuitous. An issue arose, the tech bosses independently reached the same conclusion and acted upon it as is their right. So what’s the problem?

The apparent coordination by Amazon, Apple and Twitter might seem like a straightforward violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits agreements in “unreasonable restraint of trade” that harm consumers.

If there was a discussion, an agreement, “coordination” as Shrier calls it, then there’s a trust in restraint of trade. But just because they each reached similar conclusions at about the same time doesn’t mean there was any coordination. As Shrier contends, it would be nearly impossible to overcome the requirements of Twombly to prove they had a secret agreement, and chances are they didn’t. They didn’t need to.

The “monopoly” claimed isn’t the creature of tech giants reaching secret agreements to deny wrong views, ideas, words, books or the people who utter them access to the universe of technology, from platforms to the tubes to get to the platforms. It’s the “monopoly” of the woke, a tacit agreement to exert secondary pressure on every enterprise whose product or service permits the existence of ideas they deem anathema to exist.

But they’re not a business subject to antitrust, and they, too, can exert whatever influence they can muster on secondary businesses that they place in their crosshairs. And if the businesses decide it’s in their best interest to capitulate to the demands of the woke cartel, that’s what they’ll do.