Antitrust by Amy Klobuchar

Author:Amy Klobuchar [Klobuchar, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

For years, Big Tech companies like Facebook have been using and selling our data despite consumers’ belief that their privacy policies protect us. The details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that emerged in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, including the foreign interference in that election using Americans’ private information, should be of concern to all of us.

Multiple hacks and consumer data breaches—from Equifax to Facebook and Twitter and from Yahoo to Capital One—have caught the eye of all American lawmakers over the past few years. While tech companies and social networks sell ads and want to maximize the time users spend on their platforms, there must be rules of the road for privacy. Also, there needs to be enhanced coordination between the U.S. government and businesses for cyber protection on both the domestic and the international levels so people’s most sensitive data is not stolen or misused. As America learned the hard way after finding out about the Russian-led hack of 2020, which involved a significant number of government agencies and businesses, we need international best practices and workable legal standards, better-trained cyber investigators to aid in enforcement, and more cyber education. My truth-in-political-advertising and election security bills—the Honest Ads Act and the Secure Elections Act—exemplify other sensible things that we can do to protect our democracy and reduce disinformation.

Finally, holding companies liable for data acquisition—and then the selling of that data—could be accomplished through the tax code. Large platforms such as Facebook, I’ve noted, “use us, and we’re their commodity, and we’re not getting anything out of it.” One possibility I’ve floated, in addition to making sure we better protect the privacy of consumers, is to tax Big Tech companies on the profits they make when they collect and use our data. “When they sell our data to someone else,” I noted in 2019, “maybe they’re going to have to tell us so we can put some kind of a tax on it.”

No. 24—Stop Using the Word “Antitrust” and Start Calling It “Competition Policy.” We should curtail our use of the word “antitrust,” except when talking about the history of the trusts and the specific antitrust laws that were enacted in response to the power of those trusts. I know the very title of this book is Antitrust, but the laws that were first passed in the late nineteenth century were only called “antitrust” laws because they were passed in response to all of the “trusts” that had been formed. In truth, these laws—and the court cases they have spawned—are (or at least should be) about protecting competition. It’s easier for people to think and talk about competition policy and furthering competition in the marketplace than it is to think in the nineteenth-century language of “trusts” and “antitrust.”

No. 25—Build a New Pro-Competition Movement. To make progress, elected officials must find a way to elevate antitrust issues in the political discourse. Monopolies and increased corporate consolidation have led to higher prices and stagnant or

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