House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is ready to take on tech companies, saying in a tweet Monday night that “the era of self-regulation is over.”
The tweet comes only a few days after a distorted video of the Speaker caught fire on social media causing an uproar amongst lawmakers who requested platforms, like Facebook, take down the false video. YouTube removed it, Facebook added a new menu directing users to “additional coverage,” and Twitter let it stand on President Donald Trump’s own account.
“Today, everything is connected to the Internet; it is the foundation on which our economy, democracy & attention rest,” Pelosi said. “Unwarranted, concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy – especially when digital platforms control content. The era of self-regulation is over,” Pelosi said.
Unwarranted, concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy – especially when digital platforms control content. The era of self-regulation is over.
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 4, 2019
Pelosi whose district, CA-12, covers San Francisco and a number of tech headquarters rarely makes policy comments that run the risk of dividing her caucus. Yet, it appears that both Republicans and Democrats are ready to take a closer look Silicon Valley’s market dominance, after the House Judiciary Committee announced Monday that it would be launching a bipartisan investigation into companies like Facebook and Google. The antitrust subpanel chair, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) hinted at a probe of this scale for a few months, sending letters to agencies like the Federal Trade Commission prompting officials to open their own investigations into Facebook’s market power.
Now both the Justice Department and the FTC appear to be preparing antitrust probes, and Congress will be heading their own as well. Over the weekend, reports surfaced that the FTC would have the authority to look into Facebook and Amazon, and the Justice Department would have jurisdiction over Google and Apple. Congress looks to be setting up a more wide-ranging investigation into the business practices of tech companies in order to assess whether new antitrust legislation should be proposed that is better-suited for Big Tech. Over in the Senate, lawmakers have been attempting to craft an overarching data privacy bill, but it’s unclear when (or if) it will be introduced or what it will even contain.
The committee “will begin a long overdue investigation to determine if dominant digital platforms have harmed Americans in the marketplace & the voting booth,” Pelosi said.
This article is from The Verge
