Notebook: (2) Small Biz
by Ann Kjellberg, editor
Our current partner bookseller, Community Bookstore, participating in the 2020 “Boxed Out” pop-up campaign to raise awareness of Amazon’s harms to bookstores. Doug Cameron of DCX, the advertising firm that dreamt it up, said, “We’re taking that symbol—the Amazon box—and using it to increase share of mind for indie bookstores. We want the public to think about what they’re doing and understand that buying from Amazon has big repercussions for small businesses.”
Read Part One of this post here
Perhaps more ominously for those of us who are concerned about the hegemony of big tech over public discourse, some of Donald Trump’s appointees to positions governing antitrust enforcement have also expressed as part of their rationale for opposing big tech an objection in principle to content moderation, which they see as hostile to conservative messaging (see our Notebook, “Immoderate,” from September). “The FTC must protect Americans’ freedom of speech online,” FTC appointee Andrew Ferguson wrote in a statement early in December. Referring to processes used by social media companies to limit toxic content, harassment, hate speech, and disinformation, he continued “if platforms or advertisers are colluding to suppress free speech in violation of the antitrust laws, the FTC must prosecute them and break up those cartels.” He argues the government should “confront advertiser boycotts,” like those of companies that stopped advertising on the social media platform of Trump Administration advisor Elon Musk due to fear of finding their ads alongside “harmful or risky” content, because they “threaten competition.” (Boycotts were held to be constitutionally protected expression in a 1982 Supreme Court decision.) Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s appointee for the Federal Communications Committee, shared Andrew Ferguson’s comment with an approving emoji. A policy agenda on the Trump Campaign web site promises to ban federal money from nonprofits that research mis- and dis-information and lay out criminal penalties for federal employees who seek to influence social media distribution, an issue we discussed this Notebook, “Mr. Smith and Goliath.”
The FCC has not historically involved itself in policing the communications it regulates with licensing and infrastructure, but Brendan Carr, another close associate of Elon Musk, has declared that “the censorship cartel” of the big tech firms “must be dismantled” and that “when the transition is complete, the FCC will have an important role to play reining in Big Tech [and] ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest,” echoing Donald Trump’s FBI appointee Kash Patel, who has vowed to “come after the people in media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden to rig presidential elections.” The president-elect has also promised legal action of his own against The New York Times, CBS News, and Random House for coverage he found objectionable, and indeed just yesterday ABC issued an apology and promised a $15 million donation to Donald Trump’s presidential library plus reimbursed legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit, a move prompting a number of observers to quote historian Timothy Snyder’s phrase, “anticipatory obediance.” News outlets have become anxious that even meritless cases of this kind can incur debilitating legal costs. During the campaign Donald Trump called on the FCC to revoke licenses of outlets of whose coverage he disapproved.
Donald Trump’s appointees may be united in opposing the tech companies’ moderation systems, but it is not clear that they subscribe to the Biden Administration policies on containing other monopolistic practices, which include live FTC lawsuits against monopolistic behavior by Amazon, Apple, and Google. In spite of his alleged solidarity with “Little Tech,” Donald Trump has in recent months been seen forging personal relationships not only with Elon Musk but with Apple’s Peter Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, which, Bloomberg observes, may put his administration at odds with more muscular tech-resistant regulation being rolled out by the EU. Regulation of artificial intelligence, which was in the early days after the unsettling arrival of ChatGPT two years ago (see our Notebook, “Exercising Intelligence”) embraced by the tycoons at its helm, most notably OpenAI’s Sam Altman—in part perhaps because they wanted a hand in any eventual regulation and hoped it might hobble their competitors—now appears to be off the table. Donald Trump appointed as his “Crypto and AI Czar” his major Silicon Valley donor David Sacks, who with Elon Musk and tech libertarian Peter Thiel founded PayPal, and who is an outspoken opponent of government intervention in business. Although Congress has not managed to deliver meaningful regulation on Big Tech, in spite of some significant investigations (see our Book Note), the Biden Administration did issue an executive order to create AI safeguards a year ago and the FTC is reportedly racing to complete a report on AI before the inauguration, investigating billions of dollars in AI investments for antitrust violations. The FTC also issued a report in September on the “vast surveillance” of customers by social media and streaming companies. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who as owner withheld a Washington Post editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, posted congratulations to Donald Trump on his election, as did OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s Tim Cook. Sam Altman, Meta, and Amazon are donating millions to the president-elect’s inauguration fund.
Two recent court decisions also have big-tech implications heading into this period of uncertainty. A panel of judges for the DC circuit Court of Appeals on December 6 unanimously upheld a new law requiring TikTok to be sold by its Chinese owner ByteDance by the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration or be banned. Also a decision this week by the Ohio Supreme Court disqualifying the use of “public nuisance” laws to require drug manufacturers to redress harms from the opioid epidemic could limit the use of those laws in cases against social media companies over their harms to children.
Donald Trump’s candidacy drew considerable strength from his indictment of “globalization” and his promise to return prosperity to communities that lost industrial jobs overseas, an outcome that he proposes to redress with punishing tariffs. But his incipient administration does not appear occupied with the losses of local economies to national consolidation—the displacement of wealth and control not only in information technologies onto a very few large corporations that overwhelm and deplete their local competitors—crushing independent sources of information like booksellers and newspapers and TV and radio stations along with local grocers; evacuating main streets and places of shared gathering; withering civic connectedness.
In the face of the menace posed by a few disinhibited tech companies and other assaults on independent media, observers have noted in both books and journalism that no “Trump bump” analogous to the surge of audience both for political journalism and political nonfiction from 2016 to 2020 seems to be forthcoming. “Exhausted” seems to be the word most often invoked to describe the late 2024 readership, which seems to be leaning toward escapist alternatives like TikTok-friendly romance and fantasy, a nonfiction slump in effect for years not showing signs of abating. In my first holiday Notebook of 2018, urging readers to shop local and considering the “difficult straights for all sorts of human-scale institutions that used to bring us together around ideas and culture,” I suggested supporting independent media and sources of access to information like bookstores and libraries as a means of promoting and preserving the “infrastructure of the mind.” This appeal seems today more urgent than it did even in 2018.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find her other “Notebook” posts on the writing and reading life and the life of reading and writing here.
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