Big tech backlash flips the election.
Pearlstein 23 [Steven; Steven Pearlstein is the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. He was previously a business and economics columnist at The Post, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2008. He was also awarded the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He is the author of "Moral Capitalism, Why Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor." Early in his career, he worked for members of both the U.S. House and Senate.; 7-6-2023; “Here’s the inside story of how Congress failed to rein in Big Tech”; https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/06/congress-facebook-google-amazon-apple-regulation-failure/] Vikrant
Love the products, hate the companies — that’s the way many Americans think about Big Tech. Which is why it looked like a good bet when Congress convened in 2021 that Washington might finally rein in the companies that many believe have grown too big, too rich and too powerful — even as their products and services have become ever more indispensable to our lives. Here, it seemed, was the rare issue on which both Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, could agree.
In the end, however, Congress failed to act. And in that failure is a case study of how Congress has lost its ability to address the most pressing problems facing the country.
The root cause of this dysfunction has been the sorting of Americans into two warring tribes, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. Over time, this hyperpartisan competition has played out to a stalemate in Congress, with legislative majorities that are so small and tenuous that every issue is now viewed through the lens of how it could tip the next election.
And so it was with a handful of bills meant to end the anticompetitive business practices of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. By early 2022, all had been voted out of committees in both chambers with bipartisan majorities. All had broad support from voters, knowledgeable experts, regulators and the White House. Yet not one was taken up by the full House and Senate.