Antitrust Law Should Be Used to Break Up Big Tech Monopolies

President Donald Trump, via his Twitter account, recently prompted a public discussion about the possibility of using antitrust law against major technology companies, due in part to a growing body of evidence that bias is being perpetrated against conservative individuals and entities by such companies.

The primary rationale of antitrust enforcement is the protection of the American consumer and free market economy from unprincipled business behavior by monopolistic enterprises.

Never before in the nation’s history have companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, among others, possessed the size, wealth, dominance, control, and sheer power that the tech giants do.

With more than 70 percent of the PC search market and almost 85 percent of the mobile device market, Google currently has a virtual stranglehold on the gateway to digital information. And Google’s video social media platform, YouTube, controls almost 80 percent of the video market.

Facebook has about 2 billion users worldwide, and when the company’s additional acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp are factored in, 95 percent of young people regularly log on to Facebook platforms.

When it comes to Amazon, by the year’s end the company will have swallowed up almost 50 percent of the U.S. e-commerce business, and additionally lays claim to 80 percent of the e-book market. Amazon is also the largest provider of hosted cloud services, and the odds are strong that an online sales firm that competes with the company would likely be using Amazon servers for its own website.

Research on Google searches has produced data, which indicate that bias against conservative news outlets, blogs, and websites exists, and additionally indicate that ideologically right-of-center content has actually been removed from YouTube.

Despite Google’s denial of bias, PJMedia recently conducted a count of search results relating to President Trump and found that 96 percent of the most visible news articles that arose were generated from liberal outlets.

The Daily Caller reported that Google’s fact check feature engages almost exclusively in the targeting of right-of-center sites.

Facebook has exhibited bias in its trending topics, as well as in its removal of conservative content, and Amazon has manipulated book reviews to favor leftist writers.

Despite promises to the contrary, Facebook continues to censor ideas based on conservative content and has recently been caught doing so. A New York Post article by Salena Zito, which noted that supporters of President Trump were unaffected by the conviction and plea deal of two prominent Trump-associated individuals, Zito’s article was labeled as “spam.”

Facebook even took down an article titled “The School Shootings That Weren’t,” posted by NPR, that showed the number of school shootings, which were claimed to have taken place during the 2015–2016 school year, was highly inflated.

The president is correct in suggesting that the use of antitrust law against tech companies may be a necessary step that the government needs to take in order to awaken the tech giants to the duty that they have, to exercise greater responsibility in their approach to users and content. If they do not, consequences may result as seen with other companies, which were divided into smaller less monopolistic concerns.

In a previous antitrust filing, AT&T was split up into eight much smaller companies, and Standard Oil was divided into 34 firms. Each of these companies possessed the ability to almost totally dominate their respective market. The original AT&T accounted for 93 percent of all telephone calls made in the U.S., and Standard Oil sold 87 percent of U.S. refined oil.

An antitrust case that began in the early years of former President Bill Clinton’s administration was ultimately settled by the Department of Justice. Microsoft had been accused of abusing monopoly power on personal computers, in its handling of operating system and web browser sales, by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system.

Microsoft’s actions are strikingly similar to a recent Google business practice. To insure its dominance of the mobile market, Google forced carriers and manufactures that used its Android operating system to make Google Search the default search engine and include a number of Google apps as well.

In 2008 the Bush Justice Department threatened to bring an antitrust action against Google, due to a proposed partnership with Yahoo for the sale of advertising. At the time, Google had a 70 percent share of the market, and Yahoo, with 20 percent, was the second largest search engine.

Due to the monopolistic realities of these giant tech companies, startups that might compete with the giants may end up being smothered. For example, an entrepreneurial startup company with products that compete with Google offerings has to be concerned that Google will give its own product a higher ranking and may even hide the new company’s competing products.

This poses a danger to the overall consumer market, because consumers lose the ability to become aware of and/or purchase any innovative products that startup companies might have to offer.

Both Google and Facebook maintain that their companies should not be the subject of antitrust scrutiny, because their product is said to be provided to their users free of charge. However, participants who are obtaining the services for free are not the actual customers of the companies. The real paying customers, in both search and social media, are the advertisers and publishers that pay for the ability to broaden their own pool of consumers.

The argument can be made that the big tech companies, via paid search advertising and paid social media advertising, have morphed into monopolies, and these monopolies have effectively stifled competition and innovation, while having a deleterious effect on the free market economy.

The Left’s Attempt to Silence Kanye West

Author and conservative icon Andrew Breitbart had a phrase that rings true to this day: “Politics is downstream from culture.”

For decades now the left has maneuvered its way into dominating the pop culture as well as the cult of personality itself. Liberal political mantras have engulfed a once vibrant arena in which an exchange of ideas lived and breathed.

Far-left activists, who in many instances amassed their fortunes on fertile Left Coast soil, took to using their positions of prominence to force agenda-ridden content into every facet of the entertainment industry.

Kanye West, one of the most well known celebrities in the entertainment world, recently disrupted the info world order and did so by expressing to his millions of Twitter followers material that is contrary to current liberal doxology.

Kanye’s first tweet made social media heads explode.

“I like the way Candace Owens thinks,” the rapper-entrepreneur posted.

Essentially Kanye endorsed Owens, who is a talented African-American woman who speaks out against victim-hood and, in her words, the “Democratic Party plantation.”

The media organs of the left reacted in predictable fashion, attempting to disparage, isolate, and destroy Kanye as well as any other notable individual who would dare traffic in liberal political “heresy.”

The pattern has become all too familiar as has been witnessed with various other celebrities, including Shania Twain, Roseanne, and Tim Allen. However, Kanye’s position in pop culture appears to pose a greater threat to the liberal powers that be, particularly because he is an African-American who is held in high esteem within his own community and an ever widening circle.

West has been known to frequently delve into matters deemed controversial, but in this case the media appear to have placed him on an exile list for having expressed views that differ from the mandated liberal slate.

A highly unusual number of Kanye-bashing headlines have arisen, including the following:

— “You Know You’ve F***ed Up When Donald Trump Thanks You” (Esquire)

— “How Red-Pill Culture Jumped the Fence and Got to Kanye West” (Wired)

— “The bizarre political evolution of Kanye West” (The Washington Post)

The Post was not done yet. It went on to viciously associate Kanye with the Alt-Right in a piece titled “Kanye West, alt-right darling.”

Throughout the Internet and social media, reactions by resistance trolls were filled with vulgar, profanity-laced tirades, including platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other left-of-center websites. Celebrities began to unfollow Kanye on Twitter, including Drake, Justin Bieber, BTS, The Weeknd, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, and Kendrick Lamar.

Members of the Kardashian clan, Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, apparently also stopped following Kanye. Rosie O’Donnell and Samuel L. Jackson tweeted out highly negative reactions to Kanye’s posts.

John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen are no longer Kanye followers. The reflexively liberal Legend evidently texted Kanye to try and convince him to back off from his recent posts.

“I hope you’ll reconsider aligning yourself with Trump,” the singer-songwriter wrote.

In a tweet of a screenshot of a text thread, Kanye made it a point to let Legend and the public know that he takes his pro-Trump expressions seriously. He texted that Legend was using “a tactic based on fear” to undermine Kanye’s political and cultural beliefs.

With a post that read “Black people don’t have to be democrats,” Chance The Rapper tweeted out what appeared to be support for Kanye. However, in a redux of the Shania Twain debacle, after being blasted on social media Chance backtracked and made statements that he is not a Trump supporter.

Despite all of the backlash, Kanye forged ahead with a stream of posts expressing his affection for the president, including a photo of his personal “Make America Great Again” cap, complete with an autograph by the current occupant of the Oval Office.

“You don’t have to agree with Trump,” Kanye tweeted, “but the mob can’t make me not love him.”

He referred to President Trump as his “brother” and explained that they both possess “dragon energy.” He even doubled down on his pro-Trump expressions with the release of a new song “Ye vs. the People”

Because Kanye is such a seminal figure within the pop culture, his independent minded thoughts threaten the exclusivity of a territory that the left wing and the Democratic Party have always dominated.

The African-American vote is a significant part of left-of-center constituents. African-American voters typically choose Democrat candidates at a 90 percent level. If there is even a small drop in the African-American Democrat vote, the Party’s candidates are simply going to lose.

Russian Indictments Could Be a Decoy

f4e881f4-d4f5-4d89-b33b-af170a676b26

The timing of the recent announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein regarding the indictments of thirteen Russians appears to be part of an effort to provide possible cover for the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the Democratic Party-aligned mainstream media.

The hasty public release occurred via a press statement by Rosenstein on an unusual choice of days, a Friday afternoon that was a lead-in to a three-day holiday weekend.

It is highly possible that the intention was to have the public focus on the headlines coming out of the press conference rather than zeroing in on the underlying facts of the matters at hand.

In other words, there may have been an attempt to employ a frequently used technique of diversion to direct public attention away from the admitted wrongdoing on the part of government, which was rapidly taking over the social media and conventional headlines.

In this case, it would be the effort to direct attention away from the FBI’s failure to investigate warnings that the man accused of the atrocious killing of 17 high school students had expressed a desire to kill innocent people and was in possession of a weapon to carry out his threat.

The second part of the tactical equation is to divert public attention toward a preferred calculated target that in this instance would be “Russia,” which in a puzzling way for many seemed in the present day world of scandals to arrive with a thud.

All of the above having been stated, there was a very palpable manipulation of public perception that occurred across the cultural, political, and demographic spectrum.

The FBI indicated in a statement that, in January 2018, an individual described as someone close to the accused shooter called an FBI tip line to report concerns about the alleged perpetrator mere weeks before the nightmare carnage took place at the Florida high school.

According to the FBI, the caller provided information about the shooter’s gun ownership, his desire to kill, his erratic behavior, and his peculiar social media posts. The caller also specifically brought up the young man’s potential to engage in a school shooting.

The recorded information should have been promptly given to the FBI’s Miami field office for further actions; however, the FBI admitted that “these protocols were not followed.”

Adding to the FBI’s public relations problems is the fact that, in September 2017, the agency had been notified of a YouTube comment in which an individual under the same name as the accused wrote, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

In an absurd response, the FBI claimed that the agency was unable to trace the origin of the YouTube post and therefore closed the investigation.

The announcement of the indictment of the Russians may have been timed to provide the media with the desired talking points that would lead a susceptible public to conclude that the special counsel’s probe was in no way a hoax, a witch hunt, or any other “unfair” characterization. This would have been another important part of the tactical equation, since many Americans had been increasingly viewing it as if it were less than above board.

Interestingly, this is an indictment of thirteen people who will never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom or ever even contest the charges, be arrested, or be extradited. Additionally, it was made clear by Rosenstein that no allegations in the indictment indicate that the activities by the Russians had “any effect on the outcome of the election.”

What the indictments did do, though, was allow the liberal partisan media to crow about Russian “meddling,” which they predictably and dutifully did.

The Obama State Department allowed some of these very same Russians to come into the country via tourist visas and to ultimately use fake identities to troll the social media. Although the indictments set forth the defendants’ organized activities going back to 2014, former President Barak Obama did not stop them or even address the issue.

The indictments helped to eclipse another inconvenient developing story, which would be a major embarrassment for the special counsel’s probe, and that is, that former National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is likely to be set aside.

The judge who originally accepted Gen. Flynn’s plea for lying to the FBI has recused himself from the case, since he was also a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the very court that accepted from the Obama Justice Department the Steele dossier as evidence to support the issuance of a FISA warrant to spy on members of the Trump campaign.

The new judge assigned to Gen. Flynn’s case has ordered Mueller to release to Gen. Flynn’s lawyers any exculpatory evidence in Mueller’s possession. The judge has also directed that any information which is favorable to Gen. Flynn be submitted to the court, even if the Mueller team believes that it is not material to the case.

This means that even if Mueller claims that his evidence is classified or not relevant, it still must be provided to the judge so that the judge can decide what can be released. This takes away the ability of the prosecutor to withhold or redact evidence on his own.

Mueller’s indictment of the Russians claims criminality because the defendants, as foreign citizens, attempted to use media to influence voters but failed to report their financing to the Federal Elections Commission or register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Using the template and reasoning of this indictment, others who tried to influence an election could be charged, including Christopher Steel and his accomplices, FusionGPS, the DNC, and the Clinton Campaign, while the Israelis and British could bring criminal prosecutions against former President Obama for meddling in their elections.

During the announcement of the Russian indictments, Rosenstein emphasized that there are no allegations in the indictment of any Americans (including any members of the Trump campaign) having knowledge of the Russian activities.

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” enduring talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh warned, “The danger for the president” is that it would be very seductive “to totally embrace” and take at face value the notion that it means he has been “vindicated.”

In Limbaugh’s assessment, the president most certainly needs to continue to “be very careful.”

Trump’s Twitter Account Is Keeping Us Safe

President Donald Trump’s tweet, which was in response to Kim Jong Un’s posturing, has put CNN media reporter Brian Stelter into an even greater degree of hysteria than usual.

Stelter was in an agitated state when he disclosed to CNN host Anderson Cooper that he had contacted the authorities at Twitter to prompt the social media giant take action against the president.

The exchange between the North Korean dictator and the democratically elected leader of the free world dealt with the subject of the “nuclear button” of each country. Stelter apparently saw an opening in the digital realm to put a stop to President Trump’s tweets, something that those who are opposed to the Trump administration’s agenda have been trying to do since day one.

Stelter evidently wanted the Twitter censors to act in some policing type way against the Trump Twitter account phenomenon, @realDonaldTrump. The CNN propagandist cited the social media platform’s terms of service and claimed that the president’s tweet had somehow violated the Twitter-verse rules.

In a New Year’s Day address, North Korea’s leader, now branded as “Rocket Boy,” declared that the rogue nation’s nuclear capabilities are “reality,” not mere threats, and boasted of having a nuclear button on his desk.

“The U.S. should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table,” Kim said, adding that “the entire area of the U.S. mainland is within our nuclear strike range.”

In the reply tweet, President Trump posted that he also has a nuclear button, and made it clear that “it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his [Kim], and my Button works!”

Stelter also claimed, as many of his fellow fake news purveyors have of late, that President Trump’s tweet raises questions about his cognitive abilities, another transparent effort by the liberal media to distract, since their Russia-collusion allegations have fallen flat.

The CNN fiction reporter said that social media should be used by politicians to “persuade the public to come to their side.” However, Stelter is asserting that President Trump is doing something other than trying to persuade via his Twitter account.

Stelter essentially tried to play the role of snitch by reporting the president’s tweet to a Twitter spokesperson. Although there have been repeated demands from adversaries of President Trump to have Twitter shut down the now famous account and remove it from service, Twitter has unequivocally refused to do so.

In a recent blog post, Twitter indicated that tweets posted by world leaders ought to be discussed, and additionally noted that removing such statements from the Twitter platform would not be effective.

“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the Twitter post read. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, concisely highlighted the usefulness of the president’s Twitter account by explaining the diplomatic value of the “nuclear button” tweet.

During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” when asked whether the president’s tweet was a good idea, Haley responded, “I think that [Trump] always has to keep Kim on his toes. It’s very important that we don’t ever let him get so arrogant that he doesn’t realize the reality of what would happen if he started a nuclear war.”

Haley said North Korea should clearly understand that the United States means business when it comes to Kim.

“We’re not going to let them go and dramatize the fact that they have a button right on their desk and they can destroy America,” Haley said. “We want to always remind them we can destroy you too, so be very cautious and careful with your words and what you do.”

George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence Alienate Potential Moviegoers

imgonline-com-ua-twotone-35heluaid71l

Two of Hollywood’s top celebrities just offended tens of millions of would-be moviegoers with their ill-timed politically charged remarks and over-the-top rants about our current president.

In so doing, the duo may have placed their box-office potential in some serious jeopardy.

George Clooney is on record as being a certified Trump antagonist. In April 2016 he lobbed pejoratives at then-Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump when he referred to the promise to build a wall at the U.S. southern border as a policy that does not represent “U.S. values.”

The actor seemed to echo anchors at CNN and MSNBC as he mindlessly attacked the president’s immigration policies.

Clooney additionally used a string of vulgarities to vilify former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. While speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival to a fawning press, the star characterized Bannon as a “failed f***ing screenwriter.”

Interestingly, Clooney employed the exact same language about Bannon in February of this year while attending the César Film Awards ceremony in Paris.

Apparently preoccupied with Bannon’s film career (16 films produced) Clooney was again unable to control his profane language. He arrogantly claimed that if Bannon had “somehow managed miraculously to get that thing [his screenplay] produced, he’d still be in Hollywood, still making movies and licking my a** to get me to do one of his stupid-a** screenplays.”

Similarly, while attempting to sell his new movie to The Daily Beast, Clooney became unhinged about Bannon.

“Steve Bannon is a pu**y,” Clooney coarsely remarked.

He went on to call Bannon a “little wannabe writer who would do anything in the world to have had a script made in Hollywood.”

Clooney did admit that he had read one of Bannon’s scripts and proceeded to label it “just f***kin’ terrible.”

The supposed pro-refugee actor recently made the decision to move his family to the U.S. over security concerns in the U.K., concerns that are likely related, at least in part, to some serious refugee issues overseas.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Texas is struggling to recover from Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma wreaks havoc in Florida and the Caribbean, actress Jennifer Lawrence let loose with a number of insensitive remarks that landed her on a roster of Hollywood celebs who have made some of the biggest blunders in PR history.

While out promoting her latest film, Lawrence suggested that the devastating hurricanes in Texas and Florida were “Mother Nature’s rage and wrath” at the American electorate for voting President Trump into office and failing to embrace the theory of man-made global warming.

While speaking to the U.K.’s Channel 4, the actress responded to an interviewer’s question with the following comments:

“You know, you’re watching these hurricanes now, and it’s really hard, especially while promoting this movie, not to feel Mother Nature’s rage and wrath.”

“It’s also scary to know that climate change is due to human activity, and we continue to ignore it, and the only voice that we really have is through voting.”

Lawrence evidently believes that the “rage and wrath” she describes has occurred because of the election of Trump, which she called “really startling.”

The actress told Entertainment Weekly in 2015 that if Trump were to win the White House it would be “the end of the world.” She has purportedly been feeling very distressed ever since that fateful November evening.

When Lawrence experiences distress she reportedly calms herself with a “Kardashian tent,” which is a tent that she has said contains “pictures of the Kardashians and Keeping Up with the Kardashians playing on a loop…”

The actress also supposedly stocks her tent with gobs of gumballs, calling it her “happy place.”

After the public gets wind of their remarks and the box-office results for their respective movies come rolling in, both stars may need to seek the shelter of a “happy place,” complete with gumballs, Kardashian pics, and a pair of matching binkies.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: