As much as I hate the idea of the government regulating any private enterprise, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have become too big for there to be reasonable free market competition in the tech industry.
When a person uses the Google search engine, they are not offered any alternate choice when using the site. Just as Bell telephone operated in the mid part of the last century. Eventually the government had to step in to allow the free market to compete. The same is applicable for Twitter and Facebook. There is no “Squawker” and “Headbook” to compete with these behemoths. The fact that there is now surfacing rumors of censorship of conservative viewpoints on these sites that claim ambiguity as their primary objective, poses another problem with deceptive marketing practices.
Since these platforms have only existed for a few decades at best, and have expanded technologically exponentially with only self governance they have been able to stay ahead of any attempts to be comprehensively monitored for their bias, because of the limited personnel working outside of these companies, that have the intellectual talent to do so. Like any other company that operates in this country there has to be some level of transparency to either the public, or the federal government.
An even more serious issue has arisen with Google, refusing to work with the U.S.military, but willing to aid the Chinese government, including making military intellectual property of the U.S. vulnerable to hacking through open access to their cloud platform. This is the true definition of treason for an American company to aid a direct military adversary of the U.S.
So I am afraid at this point there is little choice, the federal government must intervene before our military and search information on all of Google’s hard drives becomes compromised leaving our Electric grid, business infrastructure, millions of Americans personal information, our banking, military secrets, our intelligence agencies and who knows how much other information could be accessed.The defiant acts of these tech giants to provide transparency could be the beginning and the end of a global tech war with the U.S. as the loser of that war!
The ability of a few ideologue employees that work at these tech giants could control the flow of information and determine the outcomes of free and fair elections, putting at risk the very fabric of a free America. If people are concerned about Russian interference, they should be extremely concerned about those who could interfere from within our own cyber infrastructure.