White House Drafts Order to Probe Google, Facebook Practices

https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/2018/09/22/draft-order-for-trump-would-crack-down-on-google-facebook#gs.vJ6cFkE

by Jerry2 • 8 years ago

105 110 8 years ago

The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.”

Back in 2014, Google outspent Goldman Sachs in campaign donations. https://www.rt.com/usa/197104-google-usa-political-campaign/

I wonder how much Google will spend in 2020.

lern_too_spel• 8 years ago

Goldman Sachs's policy opponents don't spend much, so Goldman Sachs itself doesn't need to spend much on lobbying to achieve its policy objectives. Opponents of Net Neutrality were heavy spenders in 2014. http://amp.timeinc.net/time/3677301/google-lobbying-comcast

mc323• 8 years ago

This looks like this draft order is pretty wide-ranging. It covers opinion manipulation (speech) as well as the more meaty anti-trust aspect of the above companies.

Whether this administration or another has the will, remains to be seen, but it seems clear that these advertising companies up to this point have collected user data with impunity and use it with impunity.

I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform.

tptacek5• 8 years ago

It can be written as wide-ranging as they want it to be, but the Executive Branch has only the authority to enact laws passed by Congress, so unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of, the administration is going to be stuck with stuff like antitrust.

I don't know about Facebook, but Google has been preparing for antitrust investigations for over a decade.

patrickg_zill4• 8 years ago

Yes, and the Constitution is very clear that only gold and silver are to be used in payment of debts.

But here we are...

Edit for the search-deprived: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause

prolikewh0a2• 8 years ago

I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform.

Not when those very data collection companies totally control the narrative [1].

[1] http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-...

charmides2• 8 years ago

The Trump administration's critical stance on the tech giants is one of the very few things coming from them that I support, even though their actions here appears to be rooted in self-interest and self-preservation only (just like everything else they're doing).

I hope that this probe will lead to some antitrust action that will be continued by the next administration.

olliej• 8 years ago

This sounds like they want the equal representation policies that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s (ruled unconstitutional iirc). It’s what allowed the rise of partisan “news”. It seems like any “equal exposure” policies would hit the same issues.

That said the primary “imbalanced exposure” seems to be due to evicting people who simply spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.

patrickg_zill4• 8 years ago

i. e. : People who are exercising their right to free speech.

craftyguy6• 8 years ago

'Right to free speech' does not exist outside the government. It never has, unless there's an amendment to the first amendment that no one is telling us about..

notatoad2• 8 years ago

Free speech works both ways - you have a right to say whatever you want, and everybody else has a right to tell you to STFU. Being silenced by anybody other than the government is just other people exercising their right to free speech.

Your right to free speech does to convey a responsibility for me to amplify your voice.

walshemj• 8 years ago

Yes absolutely the FANG companies and the average employee is actually fairly conservative by the rest of the worlds standards.

This isn't about say goggle uk discriminating against setting up a young conservatives or a field sports group is it.

xoa• 8 years ago

Edit: Do people think I'm making this all up or something? The main SCOTUS ruling on the fairness doctrine was Red Lion v. FCC. The FCC ruling revoking it was in 1987, and it was 4-0, with three of the commissioners appointed by Reagan and one by Nixon (there were "democrats" and "republicans" amongst them but that meant something a little different back then). Congress immediately tried to codify it with "The Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987". Reagan vetoed. Bush senior threatened to veto another attempt in 91. That's what happened. It was not ruled unconstitutional, even if you want to argue that it might have been in the 90s or 00s with changes to the court and the rise of competition from the net.

-------

that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s

Yes, this is true.

ruled unconstitutional iirc

You've completely misremembered/misunderstood this part though. The Fairness Doctrine was revoked by Reagan/Nixon-appointed FCC ruling, an action which was actually opposed fairly strongly by Congress at the time (just not enough to get a veto-proof majority over Reagan to codify the Fairness Doctrine into law). The FCC's ruling was upheld when it was appealed in the courts but not on any grounds touching the Constitution, it was merely decided that it was the FCC's jurisdiction as the law existed and up to Congress to pass something specific (which could then in turn be challenged) if it wished to not delegate that.

However previous rulings on the fairness doctrine indicated it was Constitutional. The First Amendment is the most powerful free speech protection in the world, and "oh but exceptions" is constantly overused in the press and general discourse. However laws can be passed that will survive strict scrutiny in specific cases, where there is a "compelling public interest" and the law is as narrowly tailored as possible and there are no other ways to do it. In the case of public broadcasting, there is in fact a limited amount of usable electromagnetic spectrum available. That's not a matter of human opinion but of plain physics. Broadcasters aren't and weren't operating in some wide open venue, they are using government granted monopolies on regulated slices of spectrum which itself is public property. It is not therefore against the First Amendment necessarily to craft limited, specific rules governing that which would be unconstitutional if done for print.

Or for that matter for the Internet. Which is where the current Republican arguments really go off the tracks. The interest of the rules that applied to broadcast (or even possibly cable TV if it's done using public rights of way) does not exist for general dumb information pipes anymore then it does for print (or even less). Merely being a bigger and more popular private newspaper has absolutely nothing legally to do with any "fairness" requirements, the measure is what sort of natural physics obstacles exist to them starting their own newspaper in a vacuum, not whether it succeeds. The Web is decentralized just fine from the start, anyone can throw up their own server and put up what they wish, they are not inherently entitled to force anyone else to serve as a loudspeaker.

The only areas I can see where things could get problematic is where companies have created significant and exclusive walled gardens or where physical infrastructure is involved. So Apple on iOS could (and should, IMO) be more of a question. But not on their website or the Mac, including in the MAS. Google in general should have zero obligation, but Google Fiber or maybe Play Store (weaker case then Apple) could be exceptions. Etc.

But right now what a lot of these conservative actors are engaging in is a one-sided perversion of Freedom of Speech and Association: they're claiming that only they get that right. But in reality and legally everyone else they interact with does too! Duh. And that in turn means that everyone else they deal with by default has the right to think their ideas are stupid and worthy of scorn and social ostracism and so forth. That's a feature not a bug, it's the whole point of Free Speech! The point is to work towards good ideas and make sure that over the long term it's possible for those to get out through hard work and determination and evidence and good argumentation, not that all ideas are worthy of respect.

malvosenior2• 8 years ago

spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.

The Democratic party also does these things. The issue is that the "rules" are not applied evenly. You can say much more caustic things from a leftist viewpoint and not get banned, while saying the same thing from a right viewpoint will get you banned (on many platforms).

Yes, there is toxicity on the right but there is an equal amount on the left and that group goes unpunished.

The concept of free speech is that both sides should be allowed to say whatever they want.

If you want a healthy community you'd need to moderate both sides evenly, which has not happened.

lgleason2• 8 years ago

Part if this is about enforcing the safe harbor provisions that exempted them from liable lawsuits for content posted on their sites. Media outlets can be sued but these tech platforms cannot but the entire argument for that was that they were neutral platforms. As soon as they started to ban people based on subjective criteria that went out the window. The fact is that safe harbor is what allowed them to grow, but you are no longer an unbiased neutral site when when start to curate content.

Now if they were subject to the same laws that traditional media is then I would agree with you on your first point, but then again these companies would never have been able to grow to their current size if they were.

As to your second point, the party is not calling these views republican. It is however stating that their views, no matter how repulsive, deserve an equal opportunity to express themselves in the public square under the first amendment.....and the fact is that these platforms have become the public square..... Jack Dorsey admitted to that during the congressional hearings and safe harbor strengthens that argument. Now if they want to use the private company excuse that's fine, but then lets strip out the safe harbor provisions since they are not acting as neutral parties.

Buge4• 8 years ago

I don't see how a blacklist of people (banned people) throws out safe harbor out the window. People will abuse your platform, and you can ban some of them when possible. That doesn't seem to me to make you liable for the rest of the people.

But if you maintain a whitelist of people through some manual approval step (such as a blue checkmark) I could see that being a different matter.

orev• 8 years ago

I’m not seeing the connection here between “antitrust” and the alleged discrimination against conservative views. How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue, other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies?

While I do think there are probably some monopoly issues with these tech companies, this seems more like a government witch hunt against them because the current administration doesn’t like what they’re doing, not because they are truly concerned about the possible monopolies.

craftyguy6• 8 years ago

How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue

It doesn't.

other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies?

It's exactly this.

tptacek5• 8 years ago

In fact, the EO appears to be explicit about being retaliation, since it mentions "platform bias" in its reasoning. "Platform bias" isn't an antitrust concern, and, in fact, the President has no authority to "de-bias" private companies.

jliptzin• 8 years ago

As is always the case with this administration, sometimes you can agree with their actions but in those rare cases it is NEVER for the right reasons.

IBM• 8 years ago

The decision to prosecute Google or Facebook on antitrust grounds is inherently political. It went in favor of Google during the Obama years when the FTC's political appointees overruled the FTC staff's recommendation to bring an antitrust case against them [1].

They'll still have to argue that case in court.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...

qbaqbaqba• 8 years ago

Prosecution against Google in the EU is political as well?

charitable_98• 8 years ago

...other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies?

I'd say it's more a preparation of the electorate for the real anti-trust fight coming, to increase chances for successful regulatory action.... but maybe I'm just saying what you said with nicer words. Anyways, it's very smart politics for the President.

The fact that the 'bias' complaint is not particularly substantive doesn't really matter to the politics of the situation. Google, Facebook, et al can never produce evidence that "proves" their systems are not biased (closed code, closed data). People on the fence will become fatigued with their unverifiable and self-serving protestations.

The only people who have to say "trust me" are the ones who are not seen as trustworthy.

When the REAL substantive debate begins, it will be from a stronger political starting point. It makes it easier to solidify political support for anti-trust action, and increase the chances for successful legislation.

Not really a fan of the current administration, but holding out hope that something good (pro-consumer regulation) will come out of this. No thanks to Obama.

adventured• 8 years ago

I’m not seeing the connection here between “antitrust” and the alleged discrimination against conservative views. How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue

Discrimination regarding expression and ideology/belief becomes an anti-trust issue when you're dealing with platforms, broadcasters, or otherwise distribution systems in cases where the company has a monopoly.

The NY Times and Fox News may discriminate on the basis of political ideology, precisely because they do not have a monopoly on news. If one of them were the monopoly, it would be acting as a censorship extension of the US Government so long as it were allowed to keep that position. The actions of the monopoly would be the actions of a government censoring speech and expression by extension.

Why? Because there is no alternative. At that point it's not merely a company with a bias, it's censorship.

The government is given power to deal with monopolies, via anti-trust laws among countless other agency controls. They're often the only entity powerful enough to be capable of removing a monopoly (consumers realistically can't get rid of eg cable or airline monopolies without the assistance of the government).

Google and Facebook both have monopolies directly dealing with expression and distribution of information.

Facebook's social monopoly is a multi-faceted monopoly that is extremely entrenched. Its actions to block speech are de facto censorship accordingly. In the course of censoring, it's inherently discriminating. It matters because they're the giant monopoly in social, with WhatsApp, FB, Instagram.

Google has a global monopoly in a distribution platform (Android), a search engine monopoly, and YouTube (a broadcast and distribution platform). There are no serious, large competitors for what YouTube does, it's overwhelmingly dominant. Its monopoly in that segment of video is every bit as strong as its search engine monopoly.

If Google, using its search engine monopoly, decides to remove all/most search results for the left or right politically, then it's a clear anti-trust abuse (to use a glaring example). It's using its monopoly position to censor. Only the government can deal with monopoly abuse with any consequential immediacy. For example in a case where a monopoly like Google or Facebook attempts to throw an election by using its monopoly power.

joshuamorton• 8 years ago

There's a glaringly obvious issue with this: assuming there is a government, and a monopoly publisher that only publishes anti-government media, you claim that the government must suppress anti government views on the name of free speech.

This is clearly not true. And leads me to believe that your claim that a monopoly publisher is, by definition, an agent if the government, is wrong.

nodesocket• 8 years ago

Playing devil's advocate if Google and their leadership weren't so overtly political and anti-conservative and actually bothered to show up at the hearings they would not be in this predicament.

Apple (while not social media per-say) has stayed neutral and Tim Cook has done a great job working with the administration when needed.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 8 years ago

According to current doctrine, monopolies are only a problem if the consumer is harmed. Given that Facebook and Google give away their services for “free”, it is hard to argue harm in terms of higher prices. However, if a certain portion of the consumers are getting their lawful communications suppressed, and if they don’t really have a viable alternative due to the monopoly status of the incumbents, then you have both monopoly and consumer harm.

velox_io• 8 years ago

I don't think there's been such powerful organisations since the East India Company.

romed• 8 years ago

I don't think any of our current companies are as powerful as East India Company was, or even Standard Oil.

ecshafer• 8 years ago

When Google and Facebook start having personal armies, navies, and courts then I think it will be fair to compare them to the East India company. It's premature to even use them in the same sentence until then though.

presscast2• 8 years ago

"Power" doesn't necessarily imply "military power".

w_t_payne• 8 years ago

How would such a probe be carried out?

Are they going to start reviewing source code?

tptacek5• 8 years ago

Any order like this --- retaliation for perceived political slights --- is chilling. But try to remember that every administration makes a spectacle of writing "Executive Orders", and they usually mean less than people think they do.

In the US system, the President cannot simply make new laws or take arbitrary actions by fiat. With the exception of powers extending from those enumerated to the Executive in the Constitution, the President can only administer laws passed by Congress.

In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies, all of which are animated by statutes. What you generally see in these EOs is reprioritization and, in some cases, requested changes to rulemaking --- rulemaking being "places where Congress explicitly left it up to the Executive to figure out how to manage a particular law".

So: unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of (unlikely, because of that pesky 1A), this is really just Trump retaliating against political enemies by threatening antitrust investigations. That squares with what Bloomberg is reporting, and Bloomberg appears to be the only outlet that has seen a copy of the EO.

chasing4• 8 years ago

In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies...

This is such an awful comparison. I wish people would stop making it. A CEO and the President (should) operate in very different ways with a very different set of constraints with a very different set of desired goals. They might both sit at the top of large organizations, but the Executive Branch of the US government and a company are two very, very, VERY different beasts.

prolikewh0a2• 8 years ago

From the article itself:

The document doesn’t name any companies.

Poor title, poor article. It's nothing but speculation based on prior Trump tweets, mixed with the main topic of the document: antitrust.

dguaraglia• 8 years ago

You mean based on public-record statements by the President of the United States? Sounds like a pretty solid basis to base "speculation" on.

billfor• 8 years ago

They should be classified as common carriers. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202

nonbel8• 8 years ago

People just need to use other services.

1) DuckDuckGo is great for search.

2) Protonmail is great for email.

3) gab.ai instead of twitter (heard about it but never used it; I guess twitter has some use...).

4) Voat instead of Reddit (it seemed to offer the same capabilities when I visited it a bit).

5) Facebook, nothing like this should even exist but I'm sure there is some alternative out there.

curuinor• 8 years ago

gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists

nonbel8• 8 years ago

"gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists"

Is that because they were the first to be kicked off reddit/twitter? So, reddit/twitter used to be "filled with" them?

Just think of it as part of a lifecycle then. If normal people start moving to voat, the bad people will make up a smaller and smaller percentage. Then they move to the next site, and voat becomes taken over by political forces, repeat.

Also, I'm thinking if you don't like one of the alternatives for whatever reason, is it really that hard to create one of those sites? I heard somewhere Voat was created by one guy as a hobby. A good search engine seems like it would be the most difficult one.

chasing4• 8 years ago

Have you, uh, looked at gab.ai and voat lately? Because my lord, they might attempt to copy some of the technical aspects of Reddit and Twitter, but their communities are something else entirely, to put it mildly...

nonbel8• 8 years ago

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047264

acidburnNSA• 8 years ago

I have been frequently and respectfully conversing with a relative who's a full-on Breitbart-parotting die-hard Trump supporter for the past year or so. He was throwing around a leaked TGIF video (of Sergey Brin explaining that he finds the election offensive) and saying that this confirms that Google is part a Democratic Party front that's indoctrinating children and teachers against conservative viewpoints.

He then went on to spend the next 2 weeks parrotting Breitbart's article after article about how they use foreign workers and that they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them and on and on. It was fascinating.

We discussed the government's role in regulating private companies and it was clear that the philosophy is totally tribal. Break up companies run by liberals, even if there's no demonstrable liberal bias of the service, by any means necessary. Political philosophy be damned. It's quite a time indeed, though I wonder if it's ever really been any different.

fzeroracer3• 8 years ago

I've seen similar chilling arguments be made that Alex Jones of all people is a proper conservative voice and deserves to be heard. All of these attacks on google, facebook etc are not attempts to actually fix the huge monopolies they control but a clear partisan attack because they believe they're being persecuted or censored by these tech companies.

These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government, yet this is one of the more obvious examples of overreach yet.

nonbel8• 8 years ago

"These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government"

Is it? From some other comments in this thread it sounded like "those people" already built alternatives for themselves (voat and gab.ai). Or did you mean "republicans"?

Grue3• 8 years ago

they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them

I mean the government should stop them. Aiding and abetting human rights abuses either is, or should be criminal.

Mountain_Skies• 8 years ago

Perhaps companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are actively trying to incite regulation. Social media companies have become beholden to a relatively small group of very loud activists who have frightened the companies into compliance with their political goals. They're afraid of standing up to these noise makers and have a legitimate difficulty in deciding how to best moderate the content on their platforms in a way that alienates the fewest users. Government regulation would tie their hands, allowing the companies to claim they're powerless to manipulate content in the way that activists demand it be manipulated. In such an environment where all companies are legally obliged to treat content the same way, boycott threats would be meaningless. Likely tools would arise to allow individual users to have better control over what content they do and do not see instead of insisting on the platform censoring content for them and imposing those standards on everyone else.

jim_bailie• 8 years ago

It's ironic and tragically funny that all the comments in support of this article's premise and of the successes of the current administration are being grayed out.

ignoramceisblis5• 8 years ago

HN is profoundly biased in the comments that appear--and those that are "squelched". It's pathetic.

Example:

1 hour ago, user "remarkEon" posted something that was flagged, and then removed entirely, but before it was removed, the children comments gave hint that it included essentially: 'Many people with conservative views in general are being suppressed; it is not limited to people who speak out e.g. against minorities.'

I assume this because, the comments replying to it were essentially bashing it as if the onus was on remarkEon to provide examples substantiating his/her claim. As if the concept is so unfathomable.

For example, a child comment from user "notatoad" 1 hour stated (in full):

Can you give even a single example of how the parent comment is a gross misrepresentation?
Who is a conservative personality that's been silenced by a tech company but has never attacked minorities, equal rights, or promoted violence?

An early reply to that from user "itbeho" stated (in full):

Just today...
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspen...

"itbeho" was further grayed out. For providing exactly a requested example substantiating the statement that remarkEon was alluding to. And an example from /just today/.

All posters who were critical of the parent poster "remarkEon" were "in full view"--with black comments.

As with tech in general, we need particular users and/or moderators of HN to stop suppressing true statements of fact. Especially when there is a systemic, clear bias against a specific "political flavor" to the statements.

This is precisely the issue discussed in the linked article. Peoples' perspectives of reality are being warped by what is shown to them--and what is hidden from them. Certain facts are being suppressed, which creates an extremely distorted view of reality, e.g. real events and the rate at which they occur.

krapp4• 8 years ago

You can turn showdead on to read remarkEon's comment, it wasn't removed.

It said, verbatim, "The kind of gross misrepresentation you’re doing right now is part of the reason why Trump has found justification to do this kind of thing in the first place."

It wasn't flagged because it went against HN's political bias, it was flagged because it was tedious, partisan and uncivil, and threads like this are destined to become cesspools anyway.

curo• 8 years ago

This seems like rich fodder for a tech debate: Trump's Twitter bans were deemed unconstitutional, how does that apply to the companies themselves? Is Google's discussion to change algos after the immigration ban just? Should antitrust laws protect not just consumer rights & competition, but voter rights & viewpoint diversity? How do you build a better algorithm for political threads?

Instead, even on HackerNews, you just see partisan criticism, minor viewpoint suppression, etc. This is ground zero for fixing these problems.

White House Drafts Order to Probe Google, Facebook Practices

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