25 Quotes About Josh-hawley

Big Tech’s business model is based principally on data collection and advertising, which means devising ways to manipulate individuals to change their behavior—and then selling that opportunity at manipulation to big corporations. The result? An addiction economy designed to keep us online as much as possible, as long as possible, to sell us more and more stuff and collect more and more information.

I proposed limits to tech’s addictive design features and reforms to confront tech’s political censorship. This followed from my efforts as Missouri attorney general to investigate Facebook (and Google) for antitrust and consumer protection violations. I was the first state attorney general in the nation to launch such a probe. Facebook, Inc. was not amused.

Big Tech had bought enormous influence in the hallowed precincts of Washington, D.C. Second, Big Tech was (and is) desperate to protect its special relationship, its sweetheart deals, with Big Government.

That sturdy American yeoman, the common man, was to be swept aside as the dominant force in American life and replaced by the enlightened, sophisticated, corporate aristocracy. America would become a corporate republic.

The new monopolies brought bulging profits without all that desperate competitive struggle. The capitalists were certain they had unlocked the secret of the industrial age. This was what the new economy, the new country, required, they decided: enlightened management and control, by persons such as themselves.

Today’s Big Tech barons have benefited from lax antitrust enforcement and outdated antitrust laws, from cozy relationships with supposed regulators, and from special protections in the law. All this must end.

It is possible to imagine a world where tech serves us, and not the other way around, where the Big Tech monopolies are monopolies no longer, where our property in our personal data is protected, where our children are safe online, where our speech is free.