SenatorJosh Hawley joined Fox News’ host Tucker Carlson to discuss his plan for breaking up big tech companies which he said have formed into monopolies that are “not compatible with liberty.”
From the Post Millennial:
Carlson spoke about the influx of “woke corporations,” including those that came together over the weekend on aĀ conference callĀ to discuss their options as regards using their financial power to influence American states to change their election laws, or reconsider proposals to that would alter them.
The bill, a “modern trust-busting agenda, would ban mergers and acquisitions by firms with a market gap of over $100 billion. It would also authorize the Federal Trade Commission to regulate dominant digital firms in online markets.”
Carlson noted that Senator Hawley was working on this legislation just in time, as it was revealed that over 100 companies got together to try and figure out how to change election law.
Hawley argued that the founders had warned of the dangers that monopolies that mega-corporations like big tech pose to liberty:
“What it would do,” Hawley said, “is put the American people back in control of their democracy, and no longer these mega-corporations. I mean we’ve got to remember what our founders knew, which is that monopolies and liberty are not compatible.
“No corporation should be so big and so powerful that it can control the political process, that it can override the will of the votersāand that’s exactly what today’s mega-corporations, who have gotten big and fat with the help of government, that’s what they’re trying to do.”
Hawley pointed to companies like Amazon, who already dominate the e-commerce business online but also have huge sway over cloud computing. It was Amazon’s cloud business that forced free-speech social network Parler offline earlier this year, with Amazon arguing that the company was not policing calls to violence on the platform:
“It would break up the big tech companies. Make them spin off the their various parts,” Hawley said. “For instance, Amazon should not be able to have the dominant e-commerce platform and also control the cloud.”
Hawley said that additionally, it would stop companies from merging together, or acquiring each other, to form these mega-corporations in the first place. Banks, also, would be forced to slow their roll under this new law, and there would be “tougher penalties” for those who break trust laws.
While Republicans and conservatives have consistently taken aim at big tech over accusations that the nation’s largest companies unfairly target conservative views, Hawley noted the potential for some to accuse the party typically supportive of open markets of taking an anti-free market approach. But Hawley insisted his legislation is actually designed to protect the marketplace:
“It crushes competition,” Hawley said, “and so the market doesn’t really operate. You don’t get a truly free market, you get a market dominated by a few powerful entities. And the other thing we’re learning is this: when you have mass consolidation of economic power, political power follows.”
“They’re too political powerful because they are too economically powerful.
The potential legislation comes as Hawley has also joined Sen. Ted Cruz in an effort to introduce legislation that would subject Major League Baseball teams to antitrust laws in the wake of the league moving the All-Star game out of Florida.
MLB’s antitrust exemption dates all the way back to 1922, though it is the only major American sports league that enjoys the protection.
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