Opinion: The Big Tech threat

Also: Is the tax bill really in danger? View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Friday, December 15, 2017 [NYTimes.com/Opinion »]( [David Leonhardt] David Leonhardt Op-Ed Columnist Seth Hanlon, a former official for the Obama administration, thinks that Republicans aren’t as close to a final tax deal as they want you to believe. “They have many obstacles between now and final passage,” [he wrote yesterday](. Marco Rubio has said he won’t vote for the bill unless the child-tax credit is expanded. Mike Lee has similar concerns. Jeff Flake has reason to be offended by the budget gimmicks in the bill. Susan Collins hasn’t yet gotten what she was promised on health care. I’m less optimistic than Hanlon sounds. Republicans seem very eager to pass a big tax cut for the affluent, and I assume they’ll find a way to do so. But [Hanlon’s tweets]( do a nice job of showing how hypocritical it would be for all those senators to support the bill. Net neutrality. Federal antitrust policy just became even more important. It has already been getting more attention recently. Democrats — after years of accepting corporate concentration — have decided that confronting it should be central to their economic policy. (Gilad Edelman of Washington Monthly did a nice job [explaining the shift]( And although I’m skeptical that the Trump administration will follow through, it has also signaled some concern about corporate concentration. (Joe Nocera laid this out in [a recent Bloomberg column]( The reasons are obvious enough: Companies have become a lot bigger, and their size seems to be [playing a role in rising inequality](. Now comes the end of net neutrality, via a 3-2 vote yesterday along partisan lines — with Republicans in the majority — at the Federal Communications Commission. If the move survives legal challenges, it will free up phone and cable companies to favor some internet traffic over other traffic. Critics say the policy will squash small tech companies and innovation, because they won’t be able to compete. Defenders of the policy — and even some people who favor net neutrality but think its demise is manageable — say antitrust policy can keep the big companies from crushing the small. They also point out that net neutrality failed to create a competitive panacea, since it didn’t stop tech giants like Facebook and Google from exercising enormous control over the internet. “The fact that these firms were able to cement their power at the moment when regulators were most focused on keeping the internet open tells you just how difficult it is to get that sort of regulation right,” [Megan McArdle has written in Bloomberg](. In The Times, [the lawyer Ken Engelhart argued that]( competitive forces and antitrust policy can combine to keep internet providers from hurting consumers. If big companies misuse their power, regulators can swat them back, much as they would have before net neutrality went into effect in 2015. “The good news is that we will soon have a real-world experiment to show who is right and who is wrong,” Engelhart wrote. “The United States will get rid of its rules, and the European Union and Canada will keep their stringent regulations. In two years, will the American internet be slower, less innovative and split into two tiers, leaving Canadians to enjoy their fast and neutral net?” There are a lot of smart pieces decrying the end of net neutrality (from [Slate’s April Glaser]( [Wired’s Arielle Pardes]( Columbia professor [Tim Wu]( in The Times and technology journalist [Walt Mossberg]( in The Verge, for example). If I had a vote, I’d uphold net neutrality. But I’m less certain about the effects than some commentators. Programming notes. The Times will have a new publisher on Jan. 1 — A.G. Sulzberger — and [this Wired story]( gives a good sense of his previous work here. Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show set a small portion of [our list of Trump lies]( to music, and it’s [about as delightful as mendacity can be](. The full Opinion report from The Times follows. [Columnists’ Book Club]( We asked our writers to give each other reading recommendations. Here’s what Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, Ross Douthat and others proposed. Op-Ed Columnist [Republicans Despise the Working Class]( By PAUL KRUGMAN Unless you own a business or live off assets, you’re a second-class citizen in their eyes. Op-Ed Columnist [Can Black Voters Turn the South Blue?]( By MICHELLE GOLDBERG Doug Jones’ victory shows the importance of investing in African-American turnout. 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