“America was born of dissent. It shall perish when dissent is forbidden.” Anon.
George Rebane
Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, … arguably reside somewhere between monopoly and oligopoly in the capitalist spectrum. It is very hard for a corporation that controls a dominating segment of a major market to become such a beast in a truly competitive environment, and then to maintain its standing without active help from the government gun in suppressing would-be competitors. Such relationships between putatively private sector companies and the government is called corporatism. And such participating corporatists are a malevolent disease of capitalism made possible by one of its systemic vulnerabilities. The creation of corporatism is only possible with the abetting aid of a corrupt government, one that seeks large amounts of private funding to extend its political power over a citizenry having tendencies for non-compliance with the establishment’s diktats.
According to Rebane Doctrine and the basic tenets of conservetarianism, such corporatist oligopolies invite regulation to prevent them from becoming weaponized by one controlling political faction in a democracy. (For more on this important happening, see LikeWar:The Weaponization of Social Media) The threshold criterion here is the corporatist’s domination of a broadly embedded and established public function or service for which there exist no viable alternative providers in the marketplace. When a corporatist achieves that status (call it a critical public good corporation, CPGC), then it’s time to put in place non-partisan regulations to either defang or dismember it.
At this point the lightly-read liberal will leap into this discussion with charges of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘double standards’. As I’ve recounted countless times, this response is borne of either purposive political snark, or more likely from the simplified worldview that most leftwingers are burdened with as they seek to make sense of complex societies – it must be either ‘this’ or ‘that’ with no perception of nuance or a middle-ground.
In the present case of gratuitous imposition of censorship and/or cutting off public communications completely, the corporatists are outing themselves as 1) the strong partisans they are, and 2) taking advantage of the current political environment to also quash competing companies, and all of it done as virtue signaling to support the public good. The government’s sponsors of such corporatism and corporatists will, of course, support and sustain such private sector initiatives as the actions of good and caring corporate citizens.
The solution that would prohibit such preemptive partisan actions is to have in place a law that 1) prescribes criteria to identify such critical oligops or monopolists as CPGCs, and 2) restricts how CPGCs may conduct the critical public services and/or functions they provide. In short, the profuse and protected profits they derive, when so designated, come at a price of regulatory controls that are supervised by an appropriate department – say, Commerce – of the federal government. None of this violates the strong conservetarian principle of a minimalist government being among the social desiderata for a democratic republic that creates and distributes wealth within a capitalist context.
Under such a regulatory order it would be easy for a corporation to sufficiently divest or segment its operations to escape its CPGC designation. The main objective of such an approach is to prevent what is happening today with private sector providers making political decisions as to who may or not continue using the communication services that the same corporatists have conduced people to accept, integrate, and make critical parts of their daily lives.
As a parting consideration, think about the disruption to your life were your phone company to gratuitously cut your ability to make and receive telephone calls. That situation existed for decades when AT&T was the overwhelmingly dominant telephone service provider, and for that reason it was a strongly regulated oligopoly until advancing technology made possible a competitive environment that could best be served by a break up of Ma Bell into Baby Bells, and the entry of new service providers. We all have benefitted from this paradigm, and now need to expand it into the world of CPGCs on the internet.
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