Big Tech And Anti-Trust: U.S. Political Class Smells Blood

Yesterday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg visited Washington to do some damage control on the Russian add scandal. To fix the company’s image, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a  national tour,  which much more resembles a political campaign than the personal challenge he claims it to be.

To the U.S. political world, there's blood in the water in Silicon Valley and it’s not just Facebook that is showing signs of weakness, writes Buzzfeed. Amazon is being attacked for tax avoidance. Google is accused of skewing its search results and alleged discrimination in pay and promotions against women. Uber was also hit hard recently, so hard it resulted in the resignation of its CEO.

The political class can smell blood, Buzzfeed says. Both from the left and the right, U.S. policymakers roll up their sleeves to curb companies they say have grown too powerful. It’s a sharp change in political winds for the tech sector, which so far has never had to fight against political tides that have hit other major American industries, like Wall Street and the oil industries.

“This isn’t to say that the end is near for these new giants — or even for Uber, whose business is, it says, still growing. Just that the golden age is over. The new era for them will be normal politics, normal regulation, with California senators deep in their pockets who fight for them as hard as Texans fight for oil, but with a deep bipartisan current flowing against them. They’ll win some and they’ll lose some, and some of their losses may be as bad as what happened to Microsoft in the 1990s when it flew too close to the sun." writes Buzzfeed.

Wonder what other people think about all this? The article finishes with an "Outside Your Bubble" module, Buzzfeed’s attempt to give you a glimpse of what conversations are taking place around the topic on social media.