Book Reviewed: The Tyranny of Big Tech Hardcover by Josh Hawley

The tech giants and freedom of speech Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri describes as how the Big Tech companies drain prosperity and power from society by creating an oligarchy. These new-age corporations collect consumers’ personal data, they are tracked and fed into a vast data machine to produce algorithms that manipulate users with advertisements tailored for them. The author observes that this presents dangers to everyone through its addictive model, surveillance and data theft, psychological effects on children, censorship, and predatory form of globalism. These tech giants that include Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple also control the flow of information to censor, manipulate, and ultimately sway the opinion of the masses. A network of whistleblowers inside Google, Facebook and other companies explains how the tech giants are controlling the information we receive. For example, the market abuses of Google shows that it controls upwards of 90 percent of the market for online searches, both in United States and globally, and it has systematically used that market dominance to favor its own platforms. With Google-owned YouTube, advertisers pay a king's ransom to get their digital ads on YouTube, and then, according to the platform's customers and competitors, YouTube insists that these advertisers promise to use Google ad services to place ads on other sites. That's known in the antitrust world as "tying," the practice of conditioning the sale of one product to the purchase of a separate product. The famous example being Microsoft's effort to tie its Internet Explorer web browser to its Windows operating system in the 1990s, which a court ruled illegal. Google has tied access to ad space on Google Search in the same way, leveraging its dominance in both video and online search to create dominance in a third market. Even the information in Wikipedia is tailored to promote liberal values. In many instances the information is hyped up to promote the values Wikipedia sees fit. The author says that both Google and Facebook are ripe targets for antitrust enforcement and breakup, Google should be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market, and Facebook should lose Instagram and WhatsApp application. The author suggests that there are other antitrust changes Congress should make, to crack down on mergers involving digital platforms by giving the Department of Justice the power to designate major tech firms as "dominant." And those "dominant" firms should be prevented from merging with or acquiring another business, and all of them must undergo rigorous antitrust scrutiny. Senator Hawley concludes that by tearing down Big Tech's empire of surveillance and manipulation, the congress could send the power back to its citizens.