Platforms

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Tim Cook of Apple all dodged lawmakers’ most pointed questions, or professed their ignorance. The result was a hearing that, at times, felt less like a reckoning than an attempted gaslighting — a group of savvy executives trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence that their yearslong antitrust investigation had dug up wasn’t really evidence of anything. The performance wasn’t particularly convincing.

This week's big tech hearing underscored the deep discontent in Congress toward giant technology companies, but also divisions about what the problems are and how to address them. In more than five hours of adversarial interrogation before the House Antitrust Subcommittee, the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google owner Alphabet were accused of a range of unfair business practices. But Democrats focused more on the alleged stifling of competition to preserve their dominance, while Republicans honed in more on the platforms’ outsize grip on information and public debate.

The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook -- four tech giants worth nearly $5 trillion combined -- faced withering questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike for the tactics and market dominance that had made their enterprises successful. For more than five hours, the 15 members of an antitrust panel in the House lobbed questions and repeatedly interrupted and talked over Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of

The White House said the National Telecommunications & Information Administration petition to the Federal Communications Commission on clarifying how Sec. 230 does and does not apply to third-party content online is an example of the President fighting back against "unfair, un-American, and politically biased censorship of Americans online." White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the petition was meant to "clarify' that "Section 230 does not permit social media companies that alter or editorialize users’ speech to escape civil liability." 

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act.

After lawmakers collected hundreds of hours of interviews and obtained more than 1.3 million documents about Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, their chief executives will testify before Congress on July 29 to defend their powerful businesses from the hammer of government. The captains of the New Gilded Age — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google — will appear together before Congress for the first time to justify their business pract

Reactions to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules clarifying Section 230.

Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced he will introduce the Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (BAD ADS) Act, a bill to remove Section 230 immunity from Big Tech companies that display manipulative, behavioral ads or provide data to be used for them. Sen Hawley’s bill would crack down on behavioral advertising’s negative effects, which include invasive data collection and user manipulation through design choices.

The rules NTIA has proposed are ill-advised, and the Commission should dispose of this Petition as quickly as possible. As a threshold matter, NTIA has not made the case that Congress gave the FCC any role here. Section 230 is best understood as it has long been understood: as an instruction to courts about when liability should not be imposed. The proposed rules themselves are troubling. Among other substantive problems, NTIA seems to have failed to grasp how vast and diverse the ecosystem of interactive computer services is.

Section 230 confers a unique set of benefits on social media companies and other ‘providers of interactive computer services.’ It gives them special protections that go beyond the First Amendment rights that protect everyone in this country. Congress passed this provision back in the 1990s to address the limited content moderation practices employed by Internet sites like the then-popular Prodigy and CompuServe messaging boards.