Ted Cruz: Google's Control Over People Is "Unprecedented"
“Google’s control over what people hear, watch, read, and say is unprecedented.”
Those were Sen. Ted Cruz’s words as he opened the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Google censorship. Cruz, a vocal critic of Google’s alleged attacks on conservative content, delivered a scorching statement to open inquiry.
“The Google search engine isn’t some supernatural force,” said Cruz. “It’s a computer program written and maintained by people so every time we search on Google, we see only the web pages that Google decides we should see in the order that Google decides we should see them.”
Cruz anticipated that the tech giant would defend allegations of censorship by claiming it is merely trying to remove hate speech. “Hate speech an ever-changing and vague standard meant to give censorship an air of legitimacy,” Cruz said. “This is a staggering amount of power to ban speech, to manipulate search results, to destroy rivals, and to shape culture. More and more Americans are demanding accountability from big tech for that massive power.”
“The American people are … subject to both overt censorship and covert manipulation,” Cruz told the hearing attendees. “I believe it’s time to rethink [Section 230 immunity] if big tech cannot provide us with evidence clear compelling data and evidence that it’s not playing Big Brother with its vast immense powers.”
Sen. Ted Cruz convened Tuesday’s hearing to investigate the power of Google and its ideological intervention in search results.
Cruz admits the problems presented by Google’s massive power and influence are not easy ones to solve. “I will readily concede the solution is complicated. Nobody wants to see a federal speech police deciding what is and isn’t permissible,” Cruz told Fox News Tuesday morning.
Cruz discussed three possible remedies.
The first remedy is a revocation of section 230, a law Congress passed “under the assumption [Google and other big tech companies] would be a neutral public forum.” Congress based the law on the speculation that these large companies would not be biased or take a side ideologically. Section 230 gives complete immunity to tech companies from liability from libelous content published on their platform. That immunity protection is not extended to publishers like Fox News, CNN or The Western Journal. In enacting Section 230, Congress assumed Google, Facebook and other companies would welcome diverse ideas and treat liberal and conservative content the same.
However, Cruz says Congress assumed wrong. Instead of remaining neutral, Google “decided to become hardcore leftists, to silence, to throttle, to shadow-ban conservatives. And if they continue to do that, there is no reason they should get a special immunity from liability that nobody else does,” Cruz warned.
The second remedy for addressing Google’s power is the enforcement of anti-trust laws. “By any measure, Google is larger, it is more powerful, it has a larger market cap than AT&T was when it was broken up by the anti-trust laws,” Cruz said. “It’s larger and more powerful than Standard Oil was when it was broken up by the anti-trust laws.”
Cruz did not mince words when he made his assessment, “Google is a monopoly and Google is abusing its monopoly powers.”
In case you missed my preview for today’s @senjudiciary hearing on @FoxNews: @Google is a monopoly. Google is abusing its monopoly powers. We have antitrust laws to deal with that…Today’s hearing will address that. pic.twitter.com/WtVMht4Y2e
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) July 16, 2019
“What is going on with some of these huge internet companies is really quite frankly the great challenge of our time, and a lot of people don’t appreciate it,” Mark Brnovich, Attorney General of Arizona, said to The Western Journal. “We know historically when you have a great concentration of power and/or wealth in one company or two companies, quite frankly you can undermine democracy.”
Brnovich distinguished Google from companies such as CNN, MSNBC or CBS News, because in those instances, when people tune in, they know they are receiving the news from a certain perspective. “The difference is when you do that Google search, you may not know you’re being actively manipulated. There are other results out there you’re not able to see.”
That manipulating power is amplified by the fact that Google is one of the largest companies in the world. “Any entity that gets too big, too powerful, to control what you see, what you read, ultimately becomes a threat to democracy,” Brnovich said.
The third possible remedy Cruz proposed was a Department of Justice investigation against Google and other big tech companies over fraud and breach of contract. “When you sign up with Facebook and Twitter, you assume that if you follow someone, you will see their post,” Cruz said. “Likewise, if someone follows you, you assume they will see what you tweet and what you post. That’s not, in fact, what’s happening.”
Cruz accused the social media giants of “censoring and shadow banning.”
“If they don’t like what you’re saying, they just hide what you’re saying,” Cruz said. “That is essentially a fraud on the consumer. They are deceiving the consumer because they have a political agenda.”
Brnovich speculates that the censoring is because the left-leaning companies know their ideology cannot win in an open and free marketplace of ideas. “It doesn’t matter what the platform is, if [conservatives] get access to it, we debate those ideas and principles, we will win. I think it’s one of the reasons why the folks at Google, and people with a bias know that,” Brnovich said.
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