Fighting Big Tech Makes for Some Uncomfortable Bedfellows

Critics argue that big tech companies need to be broken up or regulated because they are suppressing speech.Ms. Bass, who is organizing a Knight Institute symposium in October on tech giants, monopoly power and public discourse, said she worried that popular enthusiasm for aggressive regulation of speech on the platforms could get out of hand. James Pethokoukis, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-market think tank, was at a party this spring that included Republican donors in Washington when the conversation took a turn toward big tech companies.“They were talking about breaking them up, turning them into utilities,” Mr. Pethokoukis said. At the event, Mr. Trump accused the companies of exhibiting “terrible bias” and said he was calling representatives from all of them to the White House over the next month.On Friday, Mr. Trump took the tech companies to task again, calling them “crooked” and “dishonest” and adding that “something is going to be done.”“In my circles right now,” Mr. Pethokoukis said, “if you say, ‘I don’t think we’re seeing systemic bias against conservatives,’ it’s like they wonder about your sanity.” Matt Stoller, a former Democratic congressional staff member who is now at the antimonopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, which leans liberal, said he noticed the same thing. “The white supremacists liked to appropriate this language around antimonopoly and free speech,” said Mr. Stoller, who has written a book on the antimonopoly movement, “Goliath.” “But now there are real networks on the right that are not white supremacist networks, and the people in them are genuinely concerned about the power of Big Tech.”He said he was having to reassess his relationships with conservatives. “Three years on, it looks like the only remnant of that is this antitrust issue and, if we’re really specific about it, anti-Big Tech,” Mr. Hilton said.