Followup on JD Vance and Big Tech

by jon 2024-8-14

Funny enough, after I posted the other day about JD Vance, I saw this article from Reclaim the Net: VP Nominee JD Vance Calls for Breaking Up Google.  However, I am not seeing much to sink my teeth into in the article, such as, "Vance said lets break up big tech by doing ____."  But we do get a bit more from the YouTube video linked in the article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK1V2q05Zi8&t=1078s

Here are some notes, according to the video:

  • Brennan: Vance is one of the "few Republican supporters of antitrust reform."
  • Brennan: "If you're in office you're going to go after trying to break up Google, trying to break up Microsoft, what does that mean?"
    • Vance: "I think that [Lina Khan]'s been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech tech companies that monopolize what we're allowed to say in our own country.  ... I don't want Google or a billionaire that controls Google that's in bed with China to be able to censor American information and that's exactly what they've done..."
  • Vance: "...the presidency that started the Anti-Trust lawsuit against Google was Donald J. Trump's presidency."
  • Vance: "We want good wages for American workers, we want Americans to be able to speak their own mind in their own country and sometimes that means you've got to take on those monopolies.  President Trump already did it and I think he'll do it again if we give him another chance."
  • Brennan: "You courted so much money effectively for the campaign from Silicon Valley and from so many of these...", Vance: "not from Google and Facebook... Google and Facebook are not giving me a whole lot of money because they don't like me because I believe that American's ought to be able to speak their own mind in their own country.  And I think these companies are too big, we ought to take the Teddy Roosevelt approach to some of them, break them up, don't let them control what people are allowed to say..."

My key take away from this is this quote: "President Trump already did it and I think he'll do it again if we give him another chance."  So at this point I gather that we're currently at the "think" level, not the "plan in place" level.

Now, if we talk Google specifically, I don't know what a breakup would look like.  They are a big company.  Lots of servers and services.  They are all interrelated.  Google isn't just Search, it's Cloud and Email.  So maybe the anti-trust results will just apply to search.