Kelly Armstrong and Pramila Jayapal are not what you would call natural political allies. Armstrong, a first-term congressman representing North Dakota’s single congressional district, is a conservative Republican whose campaign priorities include limiting abortion and protecting the rights of gun owners. Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, represents the uber-liberal Seattle area and has introduced one of the most ambitious Medicare for All proposals.
And yet, at last week’s Big Tech antitrust hearing, the two legislators could hardly have been more on the same page, tag-teaming Jeff Bezos about Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers and Sundar Pichai about self-dealing in Google’s digital advertising business. If you tuned into the hearing looking for partisan antics and evidence that Congress is hopelessly broken, Republicans Jim Jordan (who impressively pulled off a Michael Flynn reference in an antitrust hearing) and Greg Steube (who stood up for the right of quack doctors to tout hydroxychloroquine) delivered the goods. But the Armstrong-Jayapal connection may end up being a lot more telling. It’s true that the push to rein in the Silicon Valley giants got its early momentum in Washington from Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and House antitrust subcommittee chair David Cicilline. But the hearing, and particularly the performance of Armstrong and fellow Republican Ken Buck, provided a rare glimmer of hope that members of Congress can still occasionally work across the aisle, grapple with hard issues, and draw conclusions based on evidence.
“For somewhat different reasons, both sides of the aisle had deep concerns about the power that is in the hands of the major tech companies,” said Buck, a representative from Colorado, in an interview after the hearing, which also included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Democrats, he theorized, come more naturally to the issue, since it fits into their general concern over the predations of corporate America. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more worried about the platforms’ control over information, especially the prospect, widely accepted on the right, that the companies discriminate against conservative users. (There is quite a bit of evidence that the opposite is true, but conservatives are not crazy to worry about a bunch of Silicon Valley liberals holding the keys to online communication.) Still, for Buck, a member of the Tea Party-inspired House Freedom Caucus, it took some time to warm up to the idea of increasing regulation of big business.
“I was one of those people that believed that the market could correct itself—until I saw the cheating,” he said. Over the course of the subcommittee’s investigation, which began in June 2019, Buck heard stories from small business owners that convinced him the tech giants were getting away with unfair play thanks to their size. “You can’t cheat like that unless you have a monopoly,” he said. (At the hearing, the CEOs of each company generally denied any anticompetitive behavior.) Eventually Buck drew connections between monopolization and other issues that trouble him about the platforms, like their possible use of slave labor, which he pointedly asked each CEO to disavow. The basic problem, as he sees it, is that the companies have gotten so big, and face so little competition, that they aren’t disciplined by consumer preferences.
Buck also worries about America’s global competitiveness. “I commend them for building these giant companies from very humble beginnings, but you can’t allow companies now to crush innovation because they’ve gotten so large,” he said. He cited the example of PopSockets, a successful manufacturer of cell phone accessories whose CEO testified in January that Amazon “bullied” his company and, after he pulled his business, allowed counterfeit versions of its products to be sold on its platform—ultimately costing PopSockets $10 million in lost revenue. “The reality is, the way we got to a dominant position in the tech sector is because we encouraged innovation,” Buck said. “And if we stop encouraging innovation, we may dominate for the next five or 10 years in particular areas, but 20 years down the road, we won’t be dominant.”
It’s tempting to look at the two parties’ approaches to the Big Tech issue and conclude that Republicans care only about the issue of political bias. The tech analyst Ben Thompson, for example, writes that the Republicans are “fine with … tech’s business practices, as long as tech companies don’t ‘censor.’” This clearly does not describe Buck and Armstrong, however. It’s more accurate to say that the bias issue is what helped them realize why it matters when a market is dominated by a handful of powerful firms.
“I wasn’t saying it happens or not,” Armstrong said, referring to a question he asked at the hearing about anti-conservative bias. “I’m saying there are significant numbers of people in North Dakota that think it exists, right? Whether it’s true or not, their user base, their customer base, a significant portion of them think it exists.” To Armstrong, the fact that Google suffers no economic consequences even when many of its users think it discriminates against them—whether or not it actually does—suggests that the company is beyond market consequences.
Armstrong, a former criminal defense attorney and self-described “libertarian-leaning conservative,” showed up to Congress in January 2019 with deep concerns over privacy, including facial recognition, but little broader awareness of tech issues. Early in the subcommittee’s investigation, he asked Google to explain something about how it handled online piracy, and he wasn’t satisfied with the answer. That hit close to home.
“I’m a huge movie guy, I’m a huge music guy, and I’m a huge local media guy,” he said. Piracy threatens the first two things, and the platforms’ takeover of the digital ad market threatens the third. “People aren’t going to make cool music if you can pirate it everywhere and nobody can make money on it. And I don’t care how big Google, Facebook, Amazon are, they’re not going to cover the Dickinson Rough Riders American Legion baseball team.”
Those concerns sent Armstrong down a rabbit hole in an effort to understand how the big platforms make their money. At the CEOs hearing, this culminated in a surprisingly substantive exchange in which he asked Pichai about Google’s decision to force advertisers to use the company’s ad-buying tool in order to advertise on YouTube. The privacy hawk seemed annoyed when Pichai answered that the reason was user privacy. In Armstrong’s view, the companies use the privacy defense to justify anticompetitive moves.
“Regardless if it truly is about privacy, it has the net effect of chasing out competition. And that only helps them. The only place you can go now for YouTube [ads] is through Google.” (This might sound natural, but it arguably gives Google’s ad business an unfair advantage: If a company has to hire Google to advertise on YouTube, the biggest inventory of video content, that makes them more likely simply to use Google for all their ad buying. It’s kind of like if Geico bought Toyota and then said no one else could insure Toyotas.)
Armstrong acknowledged that it can be hard to explain why something like Google’s ad-buying policies should matter to the American people. But he thinks the antitrust argument will ultimately come down to the same basic idea, whether the audience is made of Republican or Democratic voters. “It doesn’t matter if you have a conservative gripe or a liberal gripe or somewhere in the middle,” he said. “The reality is, these are about the only businesses alive that insulate themselves from consumer angst. Name me another business where, if you’re alienating a significant portion of your user base, you don’t suffer an economic consequence.”
Speaking with Armstrong and Buck, and Democrats involved in the investigation who praised their involvement, made clear that for Congress, the Big Tech issue is a partial exception to the rule of reflexive partisan polarization. (As Armstrong pointed out, however, that harmony could break down when it comes time to agree on legislative solutions.) But there’s something else about the subcommittee’s work that could be even more remarkable: A group of representatives with no prior expertise in the tech sector dove into a yearlong investigation, immersed themselves in the issue, and in some cases even changed their minds based on new information.
“As somebody who has served on Judiciary for 18 months, and been a part of what I think most people would say, regardless of your political ideology, is somewhat of a circus, and as somebody who has watched previous antitrust hearings, I thought there was still the stuff on the left and still the stuff on the right,” said Armstrong. “But, I mean, I just—I was proud to be a member of Congress at the end of that hearing.”
