WSJ: What Evidence Is There of Big Tech’s Harm?

As we are aware, no one has demonstrated that consumers have been harmed by the dominance of American tech companies.

Sept. 23, 2020 5:01 pm ET

In “Breaking Up or Better Regulating Big Tech?” (Letters, Sept. 21), Rep. Ken Buck calls the analysis in our article “The Misguided Antitrust Attack on Big Tech” (op-ed, Sept. 15) “simplistic and flawed” and claims that “the bipartisan instigator” of congressional antitrust concern is “that big tech companies are using their market dominance to strangle competition at the expense of the American consumer.” The purpose of our article was to show the massive consumer benefits coming from the rise of American big tech companies. If Congress has evidence that consumers are being harmed, it should present it. To this point, as far as we are aware, no one has demonstrated that consumers have been harmed by the dominance of American tech companies.

We also questioned the desirability of dismembering American tech companies, which dominate the world’s fastest-growing market, generate millions of jobs and yield equity values that are now a cornerstone of the private retirement security of tens of millions of American families.

In the same issue of the Journal, letters by David Peterson and Sam Ashenbrenner both raise the issue of political bias in tech companies’ content-control practices. This is not an antitrust issue. Congress gave social-media companies immunity from liability related to content moderation principally to deal with pornography. If Congress doesn’t want tech companies to control political content it can reconsider the immunity granted in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Phil Gramm