If Republicans can rediscover their courage, we will likely see the emergence of larger, decentralized online social media platforms.

What is the only force that can prevent so-called Big Tech villains like Facebook and Google from being displaced as dominant platforms? republicans.

Normally, those on the right would trust the markets to find an answer to their frustrations at the suppression of conservative voices in the media.

In 2007, the Guardian read the headline “Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?” Everyone laughed – for a moment.

Today, many conservatives suffering from a crisis of faith in creative destruction support policies that would perversely lead to political suppression of their rhetoric by ceding power to the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to certify any political neutrality. .

Yet the MySpace lesson still stands. Today, we should explain to young people who have abandoned Facebook for TikTok and other applications what even MySpace was.

Decades of leftist domination in schools, entertainment and the news media have made many on the right fear that they are also on the losing side of a culture war in the social media space. Conservatives feel left out by “woken up” boardrooms and discriminated against on the biggest social media platforms.

In response, Republicans are circulating a package of legislative proposals covering tighter antitrust regulation, depriving the largest social media companies of their liability protections for content posted by third parties, and even corporate dissolution.

But equating the cancellation of culture with censorship and responding with legislation that would dramatically expand online regulation ignores the nature of the Internet and government, with consequences that are as unattractive as they are unnecessary.

The left, rest assured, is rejoicing that panic is prompting the Conservatives to disregard their traditional allegiances to property rights and limited government.

One way or another, the Conservatives had better realize that an endless Internet cannot be monopolized unless the government does it. Once the government starts to take the lead in forcing or blocking, it becomes censorship. That Facebook wants regulation should be a huge red flag. It would be part of any legislative resolution and would be the dominant social network forever. After all, Jen Psaki told us. “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing disinformation there,” she said in a recent briefing.

Control, removal or promotion of content, refinement of algorithms, etc. are not coercion or censorship, but rather exercises in the freedom of expression of the companies that own the platforms themselves.

The imperative is to ensure that future conservatively oriented platforms are able to maintain these same freedoms.

This is where all the energy from the right should go, but unfortunately some Conservatives are heading in a very different direction. Censorship requires government force to block (see Congressional Democrats legislation) or compel speech (see Congressional Republicans legislation).

House Republicans should remember that while someone has the right to speak, no one exercising that right has the right to force others to provide them with a web platform, newspaper, venue, or microphone. . The Constitution places limits on state actors, not private companies, and that is what, as the courts have asserted, these platforms remain, regardless of their size, success or public access.

These vital First Amendment principles apply to government, not to the general public or to communications made possible by private companies. There can be no monopoly of private media as long as there is no government censorship.

Big tech can’t stop anyone from reaching out to someone else and sharing ideas, but perversely some Conservatives seem willing to allow the government to do it. If one thing is certain, it is that the Conservatives will not decide what counts as objectivity in a future FTC and FCC.

We must all remember that “social media” is plural: Facebook, as an entity, is a unique social media; same as Twitter. The same goes for the now-displaced ephemeral giants such as MySpace and America Online.

Facebook, Google and Twitter are not the entire Internet today: made up of ones and zeros and potentially infinite for humanity, it is about Internet technology as such, not about those who use it in their business at any time. any given moment matters.

Moreover, the media do not have to be “social” to be mass; alternative non-social media on the right, such as the Scam report, the Daily call, Breitbart, and, of course, right-wing talk radio stations continue to be very influential sources of information. Semi-social channels such as comment sections in news articles may be beyond the reach of some social media platforms.

In the frenzy of the content moderation debate, lawmakers forget that Facebook and Google are the wispy film atop the deeper real Internet. One can be a “never Googler”, as the rapid growth of the DuckDuckGo search engine, which protects privacy, indicates, or innovate a whole new means of communication, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of Zoom during the COVID quarantine. .

Social media trends fluctuate; Clubhouse and TikTok recently hit the three billion download mark. Much of the deeper internet is not accessible to today’s Big Tech, which includes the deep (dark) web. And all of this remains open and available for innovation, alternative viewpoints and new and yet to be invented alternative platforms for third party discourse.

Unless, that is, regulation cements the status quo in place. Today’s Big Tech will gladly accept regulation in exchange for permanence.

If Republicans can rediscover their courage, we will likely see the emergence of larger, decentralized online social media platforms. Discrimination and prejudice are, in an important sense, the essence of healthy debate, and enforcing neutrality by diminishing platform independence would remove the right of conservatives to ‘discriminate’ on potentially dominant alternative platforms that might emerge. in the years or decades to come.

Regarding its very limited role in Internet governance, Congress’ main public policy duty should be to foster the creation and expansion of private property rights and communications wealth on existing platforms and futures. Conservatives who turn their backs on private property rights in social media disputes over prejudice will make themselves defenseless against the left’s resistance to property rights not only in the media, but in other political debates as well. Giving in on fundamentals can serve to score short-sighted political points, but it makes the expansion of the institutions of freedom – and conservative ideas – much more difficult in the future.

Jessica Melugin is director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where Wayne Crews is vice president of policy.