Via Americas Lawyer: Big tech leaders from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google appear at the center of congressional hearings focused on whether these companies are stifling competition and free speech. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mike Papantonio: Last week CEOs from Amazon, Facebook and several other tech giants appeared before a House panel to defend their business practices and answer some really tough questions. Joining me to talk about that is Farron Cousins from trial lawyer magazine. Farron, you know, as I watched this, I was surprised at one thing. It was almost, it was almost a bilateral kind of attack on these folks, wasnt it?

Farron Cousins: It was and, you know, occasionally, it is nice to see them actually working together, especially against this particular industry. This is one that Congress, you know, the federal government at every level has allowed to run rampant for, for 20 years almost when a lot of these companies were first getting started. And now theyre trying to play catch up. And I think thats part of the reason we see Congress kind of uniting together against this because they let these, these giants now, grow and grow and grow and absorb every piece of competition along the way, or crush every piece of competition along the way. And now suddenly theyre staring down these behemoths because they didnt address it at the time.

Mike Papantonio: Okay. So weve got a $5 trillion business. Thats what, this is $5 trillion. Youve got whats been described as a digital railroad problem. What that means is weve always handled antitrust cases against the railroad, against the steel industry. Were not afraid to go, in the past, we have not been afraid to go after antitrust cases. This department of justice has failed to do it and the reason is these folks are spending so much. Theyre, theyre just spreading so much money around. You know, the easiest thing to me is to go after them on, just absolutely say, look, your 230 right, your chapter 230 right is gone. Take it from there.

Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And for anybody whos not familiar with the 230 protection, says that any of these giants specifically, really though the social media ones, Facebooks, Twitter, LinkedIns, theyre not responsible for anything that gets posted on their website. So if you go on there and you say something horrible, you issue threats, the platform itself faces no liability over allowing you to say that. And this is actually, this goes back to Bill Clintons telecommunications act. They included that as part of the telecommunications act that Bill Clinton signed into law. And a lot of what were seeing right now.

Mike Papantonio: It was a gift.

Farron Cousins: Right.

Mike Papantonio: It was take care of me, Im Bill Clinton and Im going to give this to you, which is crazy.

Farron Cousins: Well, and thats a lot of the problems we see with these giants does stem from the Clinton administration. When he deregulated further the media industry, it included these soon to be giants.

Mike Papantonio: Okay, lets talk about that just a second. Clinton comes in, I swear to you, it was about Clinton and the Democrats, and were going to get all this favorable press if we do these things. So what did they do? And go back to 19, what was it, 1980. I think there were almost sixty different independent news medias that, that covered the entire country. Now its down to three. Okay. Thats where it led us. So this is, theyre looking at the same thing here. Youre looking at this, this, at this machine that appears to be above the law. I mean, we can, they can just do whatever they, they create this nanny, you know, we now have this new nanny momentum. Were going to decide what you can read and what you cant read. If we find it offensive, you cant read it. Were going to censor it. This is out of control. And I was shocked not to see warm and fuzzy Jack from Twitter, not on that, werent you?

Farron Cousins: Well, I think Twitter, since theyre not necessarily gobbling up as many of their competitors as some of these other folks and they are, I believe for the most part, kind of strictly in the Twitter business, they have issues that have to be addressed. But I think thats why they were probably excluded from this. Because with Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, of course, they also do other pieces of industry. And this was, I think the primary focus on the antitrust, which is, which is huge. Amazon, Amazon owns everything. You know, Amazon has security cameras for your home. Amazon has cloud computing. Amazon makes their own products and sells them, giving those priority over competition who also sells on their website. This, this shouldnt be allowed and technically legally, its not.

Mike Papantonio: Okay.

Farron Cousins: But we didnt stop it.

Mike Papantonio: Think about this. Okay. Bezos comes in, puts mom and pop operations out of business all over the country. Now thats not enough for Bezos. Bezos now says, well, Im going to see whats selling really well. Were going to look at our, at our metrics, what sells real well, then were going to build the same thing and make it cheaper. You understand? So hes put, hes put thousands and thousands of businesses out of business. Now its not, thats not enough for him. Now even the people that ship directly that make these products, he says, Im going to copy what you do and Im going to sell it cheaper on Amazon. This guy is a machine that has got to be stopped and the DOJ needs to man up and say, look, weve done it on railroads. Weve done it on steel. Weve done time after time, banking, weve done it a lot of different ways. We got to stop this.

Farron Cousins: Well, and its funny too, because these companies all tried to use the same defense during the hearing and say, listen, but were American. Were American companies. Dont we want to make stuff in America? Dont we want to prevent the Chinese, they said from, from taking over? I mean, they really dug their heels in on trying to claim to be the most American of Americans. But, but really a lot of the stuff they make, a lot of the stuff they sell, it is in fact not coming from America at all.

Mike Papantonio: Let me run this by you. I, it was almost a laughable moment. They, the, you know, CEO, CEO of Google, sir, look, let, let me talk to you about your censorship. Let me talk to you about what youve done to the left and to the right. Let me talk about how ridiculous your censorship is. The guy comes back and he says, oh no, its a coincidence. These are just algorithm mishaps. Did you hear that? Its algorithm mishaps. Oh, theres nobody over at, look, its happened to us, hasnt it?

Farron Cousins: Yes.

Mike Papantonio: Talk about Saudi, Saudi Arabia, right? We did a story on Saudi Arabia. You did it. I did it. Talk about that.

Farron Cousins: Right. We, we had a good segment. We were talking about arms deals to Saudi Arabia. Google would not let it show up. YouTube pulled it, which YouTube is owned by Google.

Mike Papantonio: Right.

Farron Cousins: Because they said it was hate speech.

Mike Papantonio: Yeah.

Farron Cousins: It was hate speech. News of the day they said was hate speech.

Mike Papantonio: Well, thats not the only theyve done it to us.

Farron Cousins: Oh right.

Mike Papantonio: Weve had, of course, Sam Seder is a dear friend of ours. We know who theyre doing this to and theyre doing it, it is, it is the new nanny culture. And this guy with, with, with Google, hes the nanny and hes decides whats acceptable and whats not. Its got to end. I hope theyll keep pressure on here.

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