Big Tech's CEOs wrapped themselves in the flag and warned about China. Here's why their patriotic appeal was meaningless, misleading, and should be ignored.
In the congressional hearing Wednesday into antitrust concerns in the tech industry, the four CEOs who testified all touted their companies American roots, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg warned of competition from China.
Policymakers should ignore such appeals, because they're meant to distract from the real harms the companies are causing, and the best way to compete with foreign rivals is through innovation, which monopolies throttle.Making an appeal to national sentiments — or, relatedly, warning about the dire threat from foreign competitors — is also a time-worn tactic of corporate leaders who seek to evade scrutiny of their companies' behavior or shed what they see as onerous regulations.
Apple, CEO Tim Cook said, is "a uniquely American company whose success is only possible in this country." "China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries," warned Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of "proud American company" Facebook.
Indeed, such patriotic or nationalist arguments go back as far as the 1910s, during some of the first efforts in the US at breaking up monopolies, said Matt Stoller, the author of "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy." What's more, many of the companies that are being quashed by the tech giants have American stories too. We shouldn't ignore, for example, how Amazon used underhanded tactics to undermine Quidsi, the owner of Diapers.com, or how it allegedly throttled the business of a small company that sold books through its site just because Amazon has lots of American workers and Jeff Bezos was born to a single mother.
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