A chorus of international voices slammed the overlords of Silicon Valley when they silenced President Donald Trump on social media in January, including heads of state from France, Germany, Mexico and Australia.
To prevent similar political manipulation, Uganda blocked Facebook ahead of its election and India threatened to jail Twitter employees who had gotten out of line. The European Union has threatened billions in fines for tacit support for terrorists through Silicon Valley. Poland and Hungary recognize that big tech poses the greatest threat to their national sovereignty since the Soviet Union. And the legitimate fear of the tyranny of Big Tech feeds into videos like this, in which they outline their evil plans for world domination.
Silicon Valley has grown so impressively that literal nation-states are afraid of them. But they shouldn’t have to: America created the silicon monster, and America has to kill it – or more precisely, tame it.
It seems absurd that the “Biden” administration would dare to challenge Silicon Valley. Indeed, it is difficult to say who is doing each other’s commandments at this point. But Utahns can be proud of Senator Mike Lee, who leads the indictment against the Silicon Monster, which at the time is equal to Big Brother, Goliath and Lex Luthor.
Lee recently announced that he is ready to lead charges against Big Tech’s political interference and market repression. However, his advocacy of this issue is nothing new. As a senior Republican on the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee for the past decade, he has reiterated the need to antitrust big tech before it completely undermines our economy, political system and way of life. Debunking the “gentle totalitarianism of a corporate shadow state,” Lee said, “The Silicon Valley tale of innovation and technological advancement sold to Americans has turned into a corporatist nightmare of censorship and hypocrisy.”
The most recent example of this was Big Tech’s brutal attack on Parler, an alternative social media company that Amazon and others put down under the guise of fighting the modern Sasquatch of “white supremacy”. In any other industry, this type of criminal behavior against a competitor would result in legal action, fines, and likely jail sentences for the responsible executives. This type of monopoly corporate robbery is similar to that of Google, which uses 11,500 lines of code from Oracle’s famous Java program to develop the Android operating system. Sun Microsystems (which Oracle acquired in 2010) granted Google a three-year license for its code for $ 100 million that Google refused to pay for. The case goes to the Supreme Court, which it is hoped will finally shackle the company that has lied about not being evil for the past 20 years.
The correct decision by the Supreme Court would be of great support to Lee’s efforts. While the Silicon Monster seems unbeatable, others are joining the fight: New York is suing Facebook, while Texas and Colorado are suing Google.
If these companies were really that virtuous, why is everyone in the world trying to shut them down?
There are several ironies associated with the silicon monster’s efforts to undermine the conservative value system protecting America’s political structure. The biggest problem is that Big Tech owes its success to the two forces of conservatism: the military industrial complex and Reaganomics. Without these two, there would never have been the critical mass of talent, capital and relaxed regulatory standards in the last 30 years of innovation. The second layer of irony comes from the perspective “Because you’ve been faithful to little things, I’ll let you rule over big things”: tech tyrants want to rule the world, but they can’t even run their own backyard. Life in the Bay Area is dreadful for physical health and worse for mental health. The lively population does not form relationships or have babies. They have the worst housing and income equality affordability in the country. San Francisco is literally covered in feces, but you won’t find any human excrement in the Googleplex because – drum roll please – they built a wall. In addition, they are helping China develop its AI war machine and the actual terrorists with their data needs.
And somehow these lunatics are the most powerful people on the planet.
Sen. Lee and others need all the support they can to fight the overwhelming evil of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter. If these companies were as virtuous as they say they would be choosing to break their own monopolies, stop stealing your privacy, and give away billions for charity. But they prefer not to: the people who cannot run their own city would rather have absolute power over the world forever.
Jared Whitley is a longtime Utah and DC politician who worked in Senator Orrin Hatch’s office, the Bush White House, and the defense industry. He holds an MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai.
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