By Ailan Evans
As bipartisan legislation reining in major tech companies moves closer to becoming law, Republicans are pushing the boundaries of their alliance with Democrats.
Republican Rep. Ken Buck and Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, the architects behind six antitrust bills targeting Big Tech that advanced out of the House Judiciary Committee in June, introduced a bill Tuesday requiring online platforms to provide a version of their services without personalized recommendation algorithms. The bill is a companion to legislation led by Republican Sen. John Thune and co-sponsored by several Democratic senators including Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Friday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar unveiled a companion bill to House legislation restricting major tech companies’ ability to merge with smaller firms. The bill is Klobuchar’s second recent antitrust effort following legislation co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley in late October aiming to prevent tech platforms from prioritizing their own services.
While both parties are united in their efforts to regulate tech platforms, each have very different assessments of Big Tech’s central problems, and Republicans hope the bipartisan bills strike a careful balance.
“The Democrats want to restrict speech more. And the Republicans want to allow more speech. And there’s really an issue on how to bridge that gap,” Rep. Ken Buck said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Democrats have introduced several bills intended to limit certain online speech such as misinformation, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar proposing legislation removing Section 230 liability protections from tech platforms that promote “health misinformation” as defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. House Democrats introduced a bill in October holding tech platforms liable for amplifying content causing physical or emotional injury.
Republicans have also targeted Section 230 albeit for much different reasons, with a bill proposed in 2019 by Sen. Josh Hawley removing liability protections from tech platforms that fail to maintain a standard of political neutrality when moderating content.
“I don’t think that you’re going to see a Section 230 bill pass with large bipartisan majorities in the near future, because there’s a difference of opinion,” Buck said.
While the antitrust bills have earned GOP support, some Republicans have raised concerns that the legislation would further empower antitrust enforcement agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), currently led by Democrat Lina Khan.
“This is about power going to the FTC, the collusion of Big Tech and Big Government to, I think, further censor conservatives, further make limits on our free speech rights,” Rep. Jim Jordan, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, told ABC News after the bills were passed through committee.
Jordan, along with fellow Republicans Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Mike Lee, have criticized Khan’s tenure as FTC chairwoman, with Jordan describing her as “radical and partisan” and Lee calling her reforms a “progressive putsch.”