In the U.S., we like to pretend we’re better than all that. But of course we’re not. True, we don’t shut down the entire internet. We just restrict access to sites with the wrong politics — sort of like China. The only difference is that we leave the decision about what information should be available to private corporations rather than government bureaucrats. Internet companies are (on this issue anyway) liberal heroes. In contemporary entertainment, an entire genre — the New York Times memorably calls it “Yay, rich jerks!” — is devoted to the idea that billionaire techies really ought to be making behind-the-scenes decisions.
If we had genuine competition in search or social networking, this state of affairs might constitute an improvement. As a practical matter, however, ideologically driven choices by dominant internet corporations offer little improvement on ideologically driven choices by government agencies. That internet companies suffer no significant market costs for their decisions about whom to serve and whom not to suggests that the public nowadays has little taste for free speech. But that’s exactly when protecting speech assiduously is most important.
We need to break up these “data-opolies.”