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Big Tech is Government Handmaiden

Discussion in 'News & Current Events' started by Aaron, May 14, 2021.

  1. Aaron

    Aaron Member
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    Big Tech Is the Handmaiden of Government Overreach—Interview With Craig Parshall

    Free speech, as a value, is something that not only transcends, but precedes the First Amendment. ... The Founders were concerned that those in power would have the ability to shut down newspapers; shut down speech; shutdown freedom of worship. Now the question is, who is in power now? Well, obviously the federal government is a very powerful political machine, and always has been, but they have a new technique now of using as a handmaiden private coorporate monopolies that control the channels of information to help shut down the speech and the viewpoints that certain people in power and the federal government don't like, and that's a very, very dangerous trend.

    Q: Because some people say they are private companies, they can do what they want, they don't have to listen to government. How is government doing this?

    First of all, you have to start with the issue of monopoly power. If we had, let's say, a thousand Facebooks, which we don't have, but if we did we wouldn't have the problem we have right now.

    --It's interesting that in the Sixteen Hundreds, right after the Gutenberg Press had been in existence for about a hundred years, within the fifty years of the Gutenbur Press creating the Gutenburg Bible, there were more than a thousand printing offices across Europe publishing about half a million books. There was competition--in the Sixteen Hundreds. --

    Right now we don't have a thousand Facebooks, or Twitter, Amazon, Apple, or Google, we don't even have a dozen that are actually competitive. These are monopolies beyond any reasonable debate, and when a monopoly over information has a monopoly and uses it to the damage of citizens, then we have speech being damaged just as surely as if the government had done it.

    As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court back in the Forties, in a very important case that's often neglected, dealing with the Associated Press...

    The Associated Press decided to create it's own small, little club that they would field news and information to, and because they were alleged to have a monopoly, the Supreme Court said, Now wait a minute, even though you're a private company, if you're a media information company, and you're a monopoly and use it to harm the dissemination and diversity of opinion, then you're harming free speech just as much as if the government were doing it.

    That was the principal back in the Nineteen Forties. We still have the problem today.

    So the question is, who has the power? Are they powerful monopolies and are they using it in a harmful way?
    Associated Press v. United States - Wikipedia.
     
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