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The Mood in America Is Anti-Big-Tech

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a tour of Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on June 23, 2016. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

Have Americans abandoned common sense as far as tech companies are concerned? Ned Ryun in American Greatness warns:

We’ve allowed them to masquerade as something they are not while abusing personal and private data to pursue ends that many of us believe are not beneficial to the American people.

Our leaders need to come to grips with the rapid changes underway. AI, automation, personal data, illegal immigration, and social welfare systems are all interconnected. In the near future, when artificial intelligence leads to mass automation, accelerated by personal data, while we’re accepting small cities’ worth of low-skilled and unskilled workers, while more American workers are jobless, our social welfare systems will come to rely more and more on draconian taxes. We’ll essentially be working for the state, all thanks to the feckless leadership of the major political parties.

Peggy Noonan is concerned about Facebook’s apparent monopolistic nature, its slippery ethics and its algorithmic threats to serious journalism. In the WSJ, Ms. Noonan writes of Facebook’s famous sins and failings:

  • abuse of private data
  • selling space to Russian propagandists in the 2016 presidential campaign, starving journalism of ad revenues
  • monopolistically acquiring or doing in possible competitors, political mischief, and turning users into the unknowing product

I once wrote the (single) fact of Mr. Zuckerberg’s career is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical ingenuity by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness.

In a breakthrough report in the New York Times, Cecilia Kang and Kenneth Vogel explain how tech giants are fighting back.

Tech Giants Amassing an Army of Lobbyists

  • Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spent a combined $55 million in lobbying last year, about double what they spent in 2016.
  • They “have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.”
  • Facebook hired Mrs. Pelosi’s former chief of staff. The speaker herself has received major campaign money from employees and political-action committees of all the tech giants.
  • Google pays lobbyists who worked on the Republican staff of House Judiciary.

The mood in America is anti-big-tech, Ms. Noonan reminds readers.

Everyone knows they’re too powerful, too arrogant, loom too large in public life. 

Read more here.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.