The American Thinker has published some of my articles describing how Big Tech became entwined with the government.
Obama-Biden Administration Was Creeping Fascism (March 8, 2024)
The Obama administration started by hand-picking tech corporations, who then quickly and consequently became what we now call “Big Tech.” Combined with other measures, this effectively gave the administration control over the flow of information, including the news.
As newspapers, journals, and magazines transitioned to the Internet, Google and Microsoft took authors’ copyrighted content without compensation and offered access to it through their search engines. Improvements in Google’s search engine meant exploiting other people’s work more efficiently.
The Obama administration failed to enforce copyright laws on written works, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. …
By 2009, the news media was able to connect its financial difficulties to Google. Rupert Murdoch attempted to work out a compromise with Big Tech, but the administration waged war on him.
Instead of enforcing copyright laws, the Democrats arranged for Big Tech, specifically Google, to pay only selected outlets, such as The New York Times. This resulted in the media becoming entirely dependent on the Big Tech corporations Obama chose. The administration also signed special agreements with these Big Tech corporations and patronized them with thousands of government accounts, effectively eliminating all other competitors.
Big Tech are State Actors (July 14, 2021)
Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been state actors since about 2010. They claimed to be neutral, non-discriminating in their political and scientific views and denied any political bias—until about a year ago. Then they reversed the narrative and said that they are private companies that can discriminate against whomever they want.
I can list half a dozen ways in which they are state actors. The pressure on them from Democrat officials, asserted by Trump in his lawsuit, is one of them. Obamanet, or net neutrality, is another one. But most obviously, they became state actors when federal and state government agencies opened accounts on their platforms and started to use them for interaction with the public. By accepting (and luring) multiple government accounts, they became public forums and state actors.
…
The state actors’ status of these platforms, coming from their endorsement and active use by the US and state governments, benefitted them enormously, far beyond the visitors’ traffic to governmental accounts. The public, political parties, and other entities understood the large presence of the US government on the Big Tech platforms as a guarantee of freedom of speech and equal treatment by the platform owners.
Today, it seems normal for government agencies at all levels to have accounts (interactive public spaces) on three proprietary platforms, owned by non-competing and colluding corporate behemoths on their terms, allowing those behemoths to abuse at will citizens interacting with those agencies. This practice of third-world dictatorships was started by the corrupt and radical Obama administration.
Google and YouTube are State Actors (March 9, 2020)
The Obama Administration has delegated to Google (together with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Netflix) “powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State” and “traditionally associated with sovereignty” (Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 US 345 – Supreme Court 1974). Then, those actors usurped more powers.
The smoking gun can be found in the FCC Obamanet orders of 2010 and 2015. The 2015 Obamanet Order, officially called Open Internet Order, has explicitly obligated all internet users to pay a tax to Google and YouTube in their ISP and wireless data fees. The Order even mentions Google and YouTube by name. The tax incurs tens of billions of dollars per year. More specifically, the Order said that by paying ISP fees (including mobile wireless), each user also pays for the services that ISP gives to platforms and content providers like YouTube, even if the user doesn’t use them.
Obamanet vs. Net Neutrality (December 22, 2017)
Today, net neutrality means Obamanet, but these were different things when FCC passed it for the first time.
Obamanet has probably been the worst violation of freedom of speech and religion that this country has ever known. The confusion is excusable. The Obamanet order was rewritten secretly after a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking presented an entirely different proposal. Like ObamaCare, Obamanet was extremely lengthy … [and] exploited the technical nature of the subject not understood by commentators, most of the public, and even legal experts. And it received wall-to-wall support from the “tech” monopolies in Silicon Valley that benefited from it. Obamanet banned freedoms in the name of “protections.” Its language is directed at ISPs, but the target is all citizens, especially children. One of the banned things is family-friendly internet access. [Further, it expanded the definition of ISP:] “A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.” (Obamanet, para 112)
Obamanet has also dispensed with the freedom of speech, and turned Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and few other Obama/Al Gore cronies into internet gatekeepers.
Contrary and opposite to the media’s claims, the Obamanet order explicitly canceled net neutrality, which had been an FCC regulatory policy since 2005. Obamanet allowed cable companies to set a usage cap and not to count its own content toward this cap.