"There are growing efforts in Washington to do something about big tech,” says Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. "The recognition that networks like Facebook, Google and YouTube played a great and mainly hidden role in last year’s presidential election has spurred an urgent effort to regulate political ads online."
On the left, there's been a surge of interest in rethinking antitrust policy to deal with Amazon, Facebook and Google, the most "economically impactful" of the Five, he says in the latest article in his series on the power of the companies.
Republicans have been more muted, but there are "wisps of concern," especially from the Steve Bannon wing, says Manjoo. Bannon repeatedly has assailed tech companies for their liberal worldview and what he calls their threats to free speech.
But there's little to suggest we’ll see drastic action anytime soon, Manjoo says.
"Among policy intellectuals, there is far from universal recognition that the tech giants’ vast powers might be harmful,” he says. "The intellectual underpinnings for how to regulate one or two or several of the Five remain vague. The political will to do so is even more elusive; the tech companies remain exceedingly popular, and they are using their vast fortunes to acquire political and cultural clout.”
Part of what's hampered governmental action against the Five is the unusual nature of their power, Manjoo says. Much of what they do "exceeds what we’ve ever expected from corporations." In different ways, they collect, analyze and mediate our most important public and personal information, including news, political data and our relationships. They’re being called on to police free speech, terrorism and sex trafficking and to defend nations and individuals against existential digital attack.
They’re creating machines that eventually could approximate and surpass human intelligence. And all of them figure into economic inequality in the United States, providing vast riches to a relative few employees and investors in liberal West Coast enclaves while passing over much of the rest of the world.
Yet in other ways, the Five don't cleanly fit traditional ideas of what constitutes dangerous corporate power. Only a couple of them enjoy monopolies or duopolies in their markets, such as Google and Facebook in digital ads.
"Then there is our own complicated relationship with the tech giants," says Manjoo. "We do not think of them in the same way we think of, say, the faceless megacorps of Wall Street. The Five’s power comes cloaked in friendliness, utility and irresistible convenience at unbelievable prices. We hooked our lives into them willingly, and then we became addicted to them. For many Americans, life without all but one or two of them might feel just about unlivable."
Well, Manjoo’s series of articles on the Frightful Five may alter some readers’ feelings of friendliness toward companies that, as he makes clear, have come a very long way from their idealized beginnings in garages and college dorms.
In a separate Times article, Celia Kang reports that as lawmakers look into ways Russia used Google, Facebook and Twitter to influence the 2016 presidential election, many rivals see a rare opening and are lining up to take their shots.
The reviews site Yelp, which long has complained about the size and power of Google, has filed a new federal antitrust complaint against the search giant. Media organizations are arguing, to a more receptive Capitol Hill, that internet businesses should have the same ad disclosure rules that print and television companies do.
And the support behind a sex-trafficking bill, which tech companies say could make them the unfair target of lawsuits, "reads like a Who’s Who list of companies that have long complained about tech’s sway in Washington, including the Walt Disney Company, Oracle and 21st Century Fox," says Kang.
Yet even as they sense an opportunity, the rivals say that challenging the internet companies remains a daunting task. They doubt they can put a dent in the online ad duopoly of Facebook and Google. It also will be difficult, they say, to restrain Amazon’s fast movement into new markets, given the company’s willingness to lose money to get a foothold. And internet firms are deploying some of the largest armies of lobbyists in corporate America to do battle on Capitol Hill.
Readers: I realize that I missed Manjoo’s article last week on the Five, titled "How the Frightful Five put start-ups in a lose-lose situation." If you notice that I’m missing one of these articles, please let me know.