interesting, if accurate....
Americans are just beginning to wake up to Google’s unlawful practice of applying its own political and religious biases to the most powerful search engine in the world.
Everyone knows Google is an ultra-left tech giant that showers the Democratic Party in cash, promotes the fake-news anti-Trump hysterics of the alt-left Huffington Post and Daily Beast to the exclusion of real independent news and robs all of its “customers” of their privacy rights in ways that would make the National Security Agency blush.
But what most people, including President Trump and Congress, haven’t quite figured out is that these practices are illegal for Google, just as they are for Facebook, because of the special status and corporate exemptions to the laws of the land they have been granted by the U.S. government.
What most people don’t understand is that Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter don’t have the right you and I and most corporations have to take sides in the political debate – at least not in the work they do online. They gave that right away when they accepted immunization from legal liability, under the Communications Decency Act, from activities conducted on their platforms. For instance, they can’t be sued or prosecuted for defamation, libel, or indeed for any criminal activity that takes place in their online domains. They got those privileges by agreeing to serve as mere “carriers” of data – in other words, as utilities, like the old phone company. Therefore they can’t be held responsible for conversations, postings, or other online materials that involve illegal or otherwise dubious actors.
However, they also accepted another responsibility in order to qualify for that special protected status. They implicitly agreed to be neutral – not to provide favor to one political viewpoint or another, not to favor left-wing media over right-wing media, not to inhibit the freedom of speech of those with whom they might disagree – even disagree strongly.
But Google and Facebook do those things all day long, every day – in fact, every micro-second – by means of the algorithms they have established, based on their careful programming that boosts the Huffington Post and Daily Beast
What this clearly demonstrates is that the Internet Cartel is already in violation of the Communications Decency Act. By using its special “utility” status to promote partisan politics, adopt a consistent left-wing lens in its presentation of the news, banning content objectionable to the anti-Christian bigots at the Southern Poverty Law Center and using algorithms in search and display that punish conservatives, Republicans and other non-leftists, the cartel members abuse their special status as a mere “carriers” of data.
The algorithms used by these government-made monopolies are top secret. They need to be subpoenaed by Congress and analyzed by top-notch programming experts to see just what kind of ideological purity standards and political correctness biases they employ.
It would be that easy for Congress to correct what it should have realized all along would be a problem, considering the political nature of Google and Facebook. But nothing is easy when it comes to an act of Congress, as you know.