So, a Google phone would be a Pixel5 (for example), and that phone would run the Android operating system. Confusing the device and the operating system may seem like a small and understandable mistake if my dad refers to my computer as “your Windows” then I’d have no problem understanding what he was talking about. ![]() I am writing this on an ASUS computer, and that computer’s operating system is Microsoft Windows. The operating system is the software in the phone which makes the phone run. “Its phone, Android…” Android is not a phone. ![]() Set aside the contention about the statistics for a moment. Its phone, Android, represents 85 percent of smartphone market share worldwide.” (p. Hawley writes, “Google’s browser, Chrome, holds 68 percent of the global desktop market share and 63 percent of the market for mobile browsing. There are many such illustrations of this in the book, but I want to focus on one: Android. But that charitable interpretation deteriorates when he gets things outright and importantly wrong. Sometimes, one might charitably interpret his choices as glossy, in the service of his reader. If you’re going to write policy governing technology (or the military or transportation infrastructure or public health or baseball), then you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the objects of governance work.Īt various points in the book, Hawley’s grasp of the basic mechanics of these technologies is unclear. However, the line makes a broader, intuitive, and certainly correct point. That position is nonsense understanding something does not necessarily make one well positioned to regulate it, especially when their financial success is attached to those regulations. Sometimes, this line of criticism is in service of technocratic libertarianism, that the technology companies should be empowered to manage and regulate themselves because they are the ones who best understand the technology. Some have defended it as an attempt to simplify an issue, but it became a shorthand for a broader political issue: septuagenarian politicians writing policy on technologies (and many other issues) that they simply do not understand. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” The line is now legendary. In early hearings on net neutrality in 2006, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) issued his famous analogy, that “… the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. As such, I want to take this review to outline both why the book is bad and how a politician or legal scholar might approach these issues in a way that is actually constructive and interesting. But it is a bad book about a deeply important, potentially era-defining topic. Hawley takes a clear side, rejecting the libertarian position outright, but also engages in a lazy attempt to hand-wave the economic views that have dominated the Republican Party since Reagan. Being a culture warrior requires insisting on the political positions of corporate leaders this insistence cannot coexist with a libertarian ideology of deference to private companies. The laissez-faire economic policies that attract wealthy donors and brand the right as “pro-business” are incompatible with the insistence on governing the political positions of those donors and their companies. One cannot be in favor of unfettered capitalism and simultaneously hold that the government should restrict the speech and activities of those corporations when that speech is out of step with the right-wing positioning in the culture wars. The only value of Hawley’s book is as an illustration of the ideological tension in the American right. ![]() Hawley is so absurdly partisan that one wonders if he is intentionally aping Donald Trump in an Andy Kaufman-esque parody act that the death of satire can no longer accommodate. ![]() The problem is that Hawley approaches this problem in a way that is profoundly incompetent in even the most rudimentary technical details. The Federal Trade Commission is already mounting a lawsuit against Facebook that looks to take this action. Hawley raises the prospect of a serious antitrust action taken by the government against these companies, an action that might break-up these companies and enforce serious regulations. The book has a narrow policy focus, oriented towards a potential antitrust action against five particular companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter) any potential interest to the book is clouded by Hawley’s insistence on partisan invective and a play at heroism that frequently collapses into a silly, anti-charismatic mess. On the other hand, he’s sometimes praised as a relatively intellectually respectable member of the GOP congressional delegation. On the one hand, Hawley is a notoriously partisan figure with a clear political agenda and the aim of eventually becoming President. Senator Josh Hawley’s Tyranny of Big Tech sets out competing expectations.
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