I believe that something must be done about Big Tech.  I’m not against success in business, and I have no interest in taking the Democratic approach of micromanaging the economy, but Republicans passed antitrust laws for a reason: in order to have capitalism, you have to have competition.  Without competition, you have no price discovery mechanism, which is the very core of the free market.  If prices don’t change, then the market doesn’t allocate resources properly.  Instead, value is pulled further and further toward the dominant firm, eliminating the ability of anyone else to compete, and hurting the consumer, who has nowhere else to take his business.  

Specifically as it regards to the marketplace in tech, I worked on an 18-month investigation of their anticompetitive practices.  The more the Judiciary Committee looked, the more we found.  In one instance, a local Colorado company invented the pop-socket, a kind of grip aid for your smartphone.  They got the product to market and started selling online.  Amazon then copied and started selling its own, knock-off version, just different enough to make an infringement case difficult.  By the time the Colorado company got anything in court, Amazon made millions.  There are dozens of this type of case.  Google controls 94 percent of the desktop search market.  Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is on record as saying he was buying Instagram so it didn’t become a competitor.  

If we want to fight Big Tech, we need to use the antitrust laws to restore competition.  I support fixing section 230 (the special “publisher giveaway” for tech firms), but the core of dealing with this problem is antitrust.  We also need to return control over the internet experience to the user by creating real privacy safeguards for consumer data.  To that end, I’ve sponsored and worked to move forward a number of different bills on the subject, as well as worked on others.  

• American Innovation and Choice Online Act – would restore competition online and create an even playing field by prohibiting anticompetitive behavior on tech platforms.
• State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act – would strip Big Tech of its home court advantage in antitrust cases and ensure that lawsuits filed by state attorneys general aren’t consolidated and sent to the Northern District of California, where many Big Tech firms are headquartered.
• Ending Platform Monopolies Act – would eliminate the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control across multiple business lines to self-preference and disadvantage competitors in ways that undermine free and fair competition.
• Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching – would establish interoperability and data portability requirements, promote competition online by lowering barriers to entry, and switch costs for businesses and consumers.
   

In addition to leading in Congress on antitrust for Big Tech, I am also strongly opposed to the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Board,” or what many are calling the “Ministry of Truth.”  

• Cosponsored the Protecting Free Speech Act, to strip funding from the Board.
• Signed letter calling for the leader of the Board, Nin Jankowicz, to testify as well as pushing back on previous statements.
• Signed letter questioning the legal authority of the board and demanding answers on its mission