Big Tech
Coronavirus Pandemic Renders Small Businesses More Reliant on Digital E-Commerce Platforms Than Ever Before

September 22, 2020 — The coronavirus pandemic has taken a dire toll on small businesses across the United States.
In an attempt to subsist, many small businesses have been forced to close their physical doors, and try their hand in the digital marketplace, utilizing opportunities offered by e-commerce platforms.
“Many have had to accelerate to digital platforms to stay valid,” said Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Oklahoma, speaking at a panel of lawmakers and small business owners discussing how to improve the digital economy. E-commerce platforms have been “paramount for the success of small business,” said Hern.
While it is technically true that e-commerce platforms have given small businesses the opportunity to compete and sell goods globally, these platforms, which boost the reputation of third-party sellers online, cannot be viewed completely as allies to small businesses. The panel was convened by The Hill.
While digital platforms attempt to pose as a “friend” to small business, many of their actions align more with “foe.”
In reality, small business panelists said they are forced to use platforms like Amazon. The e-commerce behemoth which receives half of all online sales.
Because of Amazon’s dominant position, they said, small business owners have no choice but to turn to it to reach new customer bases in a critical time of need.
Amazon’s control over e-commerce distribution the market strips small business owners of their say in matters and renders third-party sellers reliant on Amazon’s terms of service.
Amazon has used its dominant position in the industry to further its own growth and hamper the ability of small e-commerce businesses to compete, by undercutting the prices they offer.
Some instances of Amazon’s control over e-commerce distribution came to light during the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee’s hearing of executives for big tech companies in July.
Amazon has used data collected on the third-party sellers that utilize their site against them, critics charge. Amazon uses this data for what has proven successful for third-party sellers to cherry-pick new products.
Amazon then cuts the prices they offer a product for, lower than the third-party competitors which operate on their site, these critics charge.
Lendio’s 2018 American Dream Survey of more than 2,000 small business owners found that many view Amazon as a threat to their business, with two out of three small business owners reporting that they view large corporations as having a negative impact on growth opportunities.
At the same time, Amazon aids small businesses’ ability to reach new markets.
Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-New York, called for facilitating a “healthy ecosystem for small businesses at each level of government,” urging that local, state, and federal government do everything in their power to help small businesses.
Free Speech
Additional Content Moderation for Section 230 Protection Risks Reducing Speech on Platforms: Judge
People will migrate from platforms with too stringent content moderation measures.

WASHINGTON, March 13, 2023 – Requiring companies to moderate more content as a condition of Section 230 legal liability protections runs the risk of alienating users from platforms and discouraging communications, argued a judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeal last week.
“The criteria for deletion are vague and difficult to parse,” Douglas Ginsburg, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said at a Federalist Society event on Wednesday. “Some of the terms are inherently difficult to define and policing what qualifies as hate speech is often a subjective determination.”
“If content moderation became very rigorous, it is obvious that users would depart from platforms that wouldn’t run their stuff,” Ginsburg added. “And they will try to find more platforms out there that will give them a voice. So, we’ll have more fragmentation and even less communication.”
Ginsburg noted that the large technology platforms already moderate a massive amount of content, adding additional moderation would be fairly challenging.
“Twitter, YouTube and Facebook remove millions of posts and videos based on those criteria alone,” Ginsburg noted. “YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, 3000 minutes of video coming online every minute. So the task of moderating this is obviously very challenging.”
John Samples, a member of Meta’s Oversight Board – which provides direction for the company on content – suggested Thursday that out-of-court dispute institutions for content moderation may become the preferred method of settlement.
The United States may adopt European processes in the future as it takes the lead in moderating big tech, claimed Samples.
“It would largely be a private system,” he said, and could unify and centralize social media moderation across platforms and around the world, referring to the European Union’s Digital Services Act that went into effect in November of 2022, which requires platforms to remove illegal content and ensure that users can contest removal of their content.
Antitrust
Panel Disagrees on Antitrust Bills’ Promotion of Competition
Panelists disagree on the effects of two antitrust bills intended to promote competition.

WASHINGTON, March 10, 2023 – In a fiery debate Thursday, panelists at Broadband Breakfast’s Big Tech and Speech Summit disagreed on the effect of bills intended to promote competition and innovation in the Big Tech platform space, particularly for search engines.
One such innovation is new artificial intelligence technology being designed to pull everything a user searches for into a single page, said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, big tech accountability advocate with Public Citizen. It is built to keep users on the site and will drastically change competition in the search engine space, she said, touting the advancement of two bills currently awaiting Senate vote.

Photo of Adam Kovacevich of Chamber of Progress, Berin Szoka of TechFreedom, Cheyenne Hunt-Majer of Public Citizen, Sacha Haworth of Tech Oversight Project, Christine Bannan of Proton (left to right)
The first, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, would prohibit tech companies from self-preferencing their own products on their platforms over third-party competition. The second, the Open App Markets Act, would prevent app stores from requiring private app developers to use the app stores’ in-app payment system.
Hunt-Majer said she believes that the bills would benefit consumers by kindling more innovation in big tech. “Perfect should not be the enemy of change,” she said, claiming that Congress must start somewhere, even if the bills are not perfect.
“We are seeing a jump ahead in a woefully unprepared system to face these issues and the issues it is going to pose for a healthy market of competition and innovation,” said Hunt-Majer.
It is good for consumers to be able to find other ways to search that Google isn’t currently providing, agreed Christine Bannan, U.S. public policy manager at privacy-focused email service Proton. The fundamental goal of these bills is directly at odds with big companies, which suggests its importance to curb anti-competitive behavior, she said.
No need to rewrite or draft new laws for competition
But while Berin Szoka, president of non-profit technology organization TechFreedom, said competition concerns are valid, the Federal Trade Commission is best equipped to deal with disputes without the need to rewrite or draft new laws. Congress must legislate carefully to avoid unintended consequences that fundamentally harm businesses and no legislation has done so to date, he said.
Both bills have broad anti-discrimination provisions which will affect Big Tech partnerships, Szoka continued.
Not all experts believe that AI will replace search engines, however. Google has already adopted specialized search results that directly answer search queries, such as math problems, instead of resulting in several links to related webpages, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy coalition.
Kovacevich said he believes that some search queries demand direct answers while others demand a wide range of sources, answers, and opinions. He predicts that there will be a market for both AI and traditional search engines like Google.
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Big Tech
Preview the Start of Broadband Breakfast’s Big Tech & Speech Summit
Watch the start of the Big Tech & Speech Summit from March 9. Sign up for full webcast.

WASHINGTON, March 10, 2023 – Watch the beginning of the Big Tech & Speech Summit from Thursday, March 9, 2023.
This is the first 10 minutes. To see the full stream, register for a free trial of the Breakfast Club.

Photo of House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee Chairman Mike Bilirakis by Tim Su.
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