So today, Google is truly an all-seeing surveillance machine. When a person uses Google’s search engine, maps, email, YouTube, Android, and Chrome operating systems, or any of the dozens of other services and products it owns, Google stores a complete record of those interactions. Google then aggregates all this personal data to allow marketers to ... See more

the suspension of the centuries-old requirement that infrastructure monopolies provide every user with the same services, pricing, and terms.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that Section 230—in combination with the wider overthrow of antimonopoly law and regulation in the 1980s and 1990s— cleared the way for the creation of an entirely new kind of communications corporation. Unlike publishers, these new legal constructs enjoyed the same freedom from liability traditionally... See more

changes to the policy map erased the legal boundary lines that had historically kept the owners of private communications infrastructure from simultaneously engaging in adjacent lines of business, including advertising and the production of news and entertainment programming

the rise of immensely powerful online communications and commercial platform monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon with far-reaching control over news, debate, book publishing, music, television and film, online gaming, and how individuals and groups share information with one another

market rules to ensure that a succession of new communications technologies did not lead to concentrated private power over essential information infrastructure or over the gathering and publication of news . Americans used public policy to structure these markets and platforms in ways that sustained the growth of competitive, financially independe... See more

the now mostly forgotten history of how, during previous revolutions in information technology, Americans successfully protected free speech and democracy by using government to carefully manage competition and structure news media markets, including through direct regulation of essential communications platforms.