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There is no one on YouTube more annoyed than me. When I used that platform to educate the public about the potentially fatal consequences of relying on ineffective cloth masks to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, YouTube took my video down and for a week suspended my ability to upload additional videos. My conviction for the crime of daring to disagree with President Anthony Fauci’s chief medical adviser was such that there was no appeal, even though the Centers for Disease Control now believes I was right.
I was surprised that YouTube rejected the principle of freedom of expression and adopted the Orwellian strategy of banishing messages that didn’t follow the official party line. In response, I used my power as a consumer to post my videos on YouTube’s free-speech supporting competitor, Rumble.com.
While many of my co-workers share My anger with big tech companies, They do not share my free market principles. Instead, the bipartisan zeal for vengeance prompted an antitrust crusade against Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. But these proposals to cut the size of the tech giants will, instead, keep these companies dominant and deprive consumers of technological innovation that only free-market competition can provide.
In other words, if my colleagues’ antitrust campaign had already been successful, they would have crushed any option on YouTube and my videos would have become invisible.
Conservative non-profit launches bill targeting ad campaigns on massive tech censorship
Amazon Fresh is part of the advantage it gives big tech consumers through vertical integration.
The contest is a winning proposition. A company that consistently rewards its consumers with better products and innovations will in turn be rewarded by consumers with a higher market share than its competitors. But no company can achieve a strong position in the market and cannot rest on its reputation. Consumers are demanding this too. Just ask the founders of America Online, MySpace and Yahoo.
One way to stay relevant in the competition for consumers’ dollars is through a concept called vertical integration. Although you may not have heard of vertical integration before, you are almost certainly a beneficiary of it.
Vertical integration is the term given to the process of a company acquiring ownership across multiple stages of production within the same industry. For example, McDonald’s doesn’t just sell Big Macs. The company processes much of its own beef as well as owns the land where its restaurants are located. By controlling access to its ingredients and avoiding dependence on landlords, McDonald’s can provide you with a consistent product at a low cost.
Vertical integration has proven to be crucial to the benefits afforded by the tech world as well. not only apple manufactures iphone, But also acquired Autentech, which developed a fingerprint ID sensor to unlock the device. Apple also sells its products through its retail stores. Like McDonald’s, Apple’s use of vertical integration allows it to ensure the quality of its product and pass along the savings to consumers.
Instead of celebrating the innovations made possible by the free market, some in Congress are calling for even more drastic efforts to eradicate the “curse of bigotry.” Except, of course, when it comes to government.
There is no shortage of bills designed to empower government control of the market and make vertical integration more difficult. Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act” would ban all mergers and acquisitions by companies with a market capitalization of more than $100 billion. As Robert H. Bork, Jr. writes, the Hawley bill “would lower the threshold for prosecution under existing federal antitrust laws by replacing the ‘consumer harm’ standard with a ‘competitive-protecting’ standard.” Such an approach basically acknowledges that the goal is not the welfare of the consumer to prevent mergers, but to seek some theoretical level of competition, regardless of whether the consumer is injured or not.
Minnesota Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar’s “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” would assume that any merger of a certain size violates the law and pass the burden of proof to the merging parties to demonstrate that the merger is legal. transfers. According to Bork, the Klobuchar bill would “enforce so many potential ways to prosecute, abuse, and torment companies that the government would, in essence, become the board of directors of every major company in America.”
Klobuchar teamed up with Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to introduce the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act,” which would prevent platforms from prioritizing their products.
Big Tech employs the same vertical integration that companies like McDonald’s use. Pictured: McDonald’s at 2142 Third Avenue in East Harlem
(Google Map)
Dominic T. Armentano, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Hartford, explains the fallacy of such a law. He argues, “Competition is supposed to reward firms that innovate first, build integrated systems, and which expand before their competitors. Thus, making such firms prime adversarial targets.” Antitrust is a screaming contradiction to the purported intent of the law and reveals, instead, its true protectionist purpose.”
If enacted into law, these three bills would, respectively, measure the amount of success a company could enjoy while trying to become more efficient, declaring some corporate mergers illegal until proven otherwise, and those kill services that consumers find popular, Like Amazon Prime.
The Wall Street Journal editors also focus on breaking up or disrupting large US tech companies, ignoring the fact that these “American giants also operate alongside emerging competitors in the global economy, especially from China. . .. . Politicians who are concerned about China’s campaign for global economic dominance should think twice before eliminating US firms that can invest heavily in artificial intelligence and compete around the world.”
Yesterday’s innovations could have been stifled by today’s no-confidence motions. As antitrust expert Ashish Aggarwal says, large firms take over smaller firms for the benefit of both the parties and the public. For example, Microsoft bought Forethought, which allowed it to improve PowerPoint. In 2005, Google bought a failing dating website called YouTube and helped turn it into a video sharing platform watched by more than 2 billion users every month. If the threat of antitrust litigation had been stronger, these acquisitions – and innovations – could never have been made.
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I may be angry with YouTube for its policies that silence debate, but I will not allow my anger to support the use of antitrust to destroy the system that made YouTube possible. Doing so now will only stabilize YouTube’s dominant position by preventing competitors from emerging. Instead of pushing for even stronger antitrust laws, Congress should allow the free market to flourish, where consumers, not the government, decide how big a company should be.
Click here for more from Sen. rand paul