Apple Got Caught Censoring Its Own Regulator Lina Khan
Jon Stewart interviewed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on the Daily Show, and told the audience Apple blocked him from inviting her as a guest on his previous Apple TV podcast.
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“America cannot be content with conditions that fit only the hero, the martyr or the slave.” - Louis Brandeis, 1914
Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Apple, alleging a pattern of unfair and coercive conduct, largely but not entirely centered around the iPhone. As part of the claim outside of the smartphone, the Antitrust Division asserted that “Apple’s conduct extends beyond just monopoly profits and even affects the flow of speech. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its role as a TV and movie producer and has exercised that role to control content.” Some economists mocked the suit, suggesting, among other things, that political power should have no role in analysis of how monopolies function.
A recent incident should have disabused us all of that naive illusion. Last night, Jon Stewart interviewed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on the Daily Show. Stewart, after a long hiatus, which included a stint doing a podcast for Apple TV+, resumed hosting the show he made famous, even if only one night a week. During the interview with Khan, he said that Apple had blocked him from interviewing her while he was at Apple. "They literally said, please don't talk to her,” he offered. Stewart also noted that Apple had told him not to do segments on artificial intelligence, adding to his earlier complaints about Apple’s refusal to sanction discussions of China.
A lot of people claim that big tech censors their content, downgrades it, demonetizes it, or otherwise manipulates speech. And some of that is just griping. But you know a corporation has too much power over speech, and exercises it, when its executives feels they can censor their own regulator. And Apple clearly does feel that way.
It’s a wide-ranging interview, in which Khan and Stewart discuss everything from inhalers to antitrust to big tech. And it’s worth watching. But the key moment was when Stewart asked Khan why Apple would do something like that. And she responded, “I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”
That is the right analysis. It’s well-known that Apple bars TV producers on its streaming service from commenting on China. When I was in Hollywood last year, censorship on behalf of China by all the streamers, especially Apple, was a constant complaint. There are obvious reasons, as Apple is de facto controlled by the Chinese government.
But this coercive behavior goes beyond its TV service. Apple prohibits app developers from discussing its 30% app store fee, and has historically sought to limit political speech, as when it blocked an app that catalogued U.S. drone strikes as “excessively objectionable or crude.” Indeed, as part of why people should care about the Apple suit, I wrote that the “corporation has become a dangerous corporation, with designs on imposing an authoritarian vision over as much of the economy as it can get away with.” And we see, with Khan and Stewart, a blindingly obvious example.
Apple’s attempt to block Stewart from interviewing Khan or to talk about AI and China worked, as long as Stewart worked at Apple. But eventually he left, and fortunately, there are other channels Stewart can use to tell his stories. So when he revealed what had happened, reporters finally had a way to describe the problem with Apple in terms people could understand. Stories appeared at Gizmodo, Axios, The Verge, AppleInsider, Mercury News, New York Post, 9to5Mac, Salon, Vanity Fair, iMore, Variety, Spyglass, NBC News, CNBC, UPROXX, Engadget, Cybernews.com, Business Insider, Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, Patently Apple, Deadline, etc. Apple, and big tech, will never live this story down.
But there’s a real dark side as well. Sure Apple got embarrassed. But Jon Stewart is a powerful media figure and Khan is probably the most famous regulator in America. Most of us are not empowered, and can’t command the media or legal resources to make ourselves heard. Stewart had the ability to get Paramount to broadcast his show, but who is to say that a less powerful media figure might not have encountered Paramount executives afraid of running afoul of Apple? The threat of retaliation is overwhelming, and even if it weren’t, it shouldn’t be frightening to exercise the basic right of speech.
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There is a culture of fear in American business right now. A common response I receive from any discussion of a monopolist who engages in coercive behavior, whether Ticketmaster or a PBM or a big tech firm, is ‘that’s exactly how things work in MY industry.’ And that is true. Apple isn’t an isolated incident.
What distinguishes big tech, in some sense, is that they organize the flow of information. And control of speech has always been a fundamental part of big tech’s DNA. Indeed, in 2009, before it had even found its business model, Mark Zuckerberg was a notorious censor. Facebook users had revolted against a new privacy policy, forming a group called “Facebook Users Against the New Terms of Service.” Mark Zuckerberg apologized, then ignored their demands and promptly deleted the group, implementing a policy whereby users could no longer form groups with Facebook in the name to block organizing on the site against his firm.
Big tech firms all censor, either through search algorithms, or through algorithms that limit the flow of ad dollars. Right now, a site I used to write for, one of the best sources for information during the financial crisis, Naked Capitalism, is being strangled by a Google algorithm that falsely determined the site has hateful or harmful content. Broadly speaking independent sites are now being killed en masse, without the resources or capacity that Khan and Stewart have. And there’s little anyone can do, except hope that a cowardly judge overseeing the Google antitrust case named Amit Mehta in D.C. notices.
Break ‘Em Up
One of the more interesting dynamics in politics right now is the pervasive fear of both government and corporate overreach. It’s hard to argue for more government authority to address corporate malfeasance, as that would extend an authority that most people do not trust. And yet it is the conjoining of corporate and government power - sometimes not even U.S. government power - that is perhaps the gravest threat to liberty.
I’ve spent some time reading Supreme Court cases this term, both Murthy vs Missouri and NetChoice vs Paxton, and both turn on the power of consolidated tech platforms combined with the state. In Murthy, it’s about government officials asking social media to delete content around Covid, and in NetChoice, it’s about whether the government gets to make rules around content moderation on big tech platforms.
Censorship comes up in both cases. And yet, so does something else, which is control of distribution. In several cases this session, the Supreme Court justices are musing on a 1963 legal precedent called Bantam Books vs Sullivan. In that case, a Rhode Island commission was in charge of banning books, but didn’t do so directly. Instead, the commission would deem a book ‘obscene,’ and then ask "cooperation" from the distributor of books, advise the distributor that “lists of ‘objectionable’ publications were circulated to local police departments,” and that they may recommend “prosecution of purveyors of obscenity.” It was an indirect censorship regime, done through a private book distributor. The analogies to big tech are obvious.
The Supreme Court ruled that the state forcing a private entity to censor was an abridgment of free expression. But what was most interesting, and what hasn’t come up, is market power. You see, Rhode Island enacted its censorship law by talking to “the exclusive wholesale distributor of appellants publications throughout most of the State.” Aka this was a case about monopoly and its relationship with censorship. (Similar cases, like an antitrust case about the Associated Press in 1945 and one about a newspaper called Lorain Journal in 1951, are foundational when it comes to market power and speech.)
Or take AT&T, which before its break-up had as its strongest institutional ally the Pentagon. Explaining why the DOD fought against breaking up the phone giant, Lieutenant General William Hilsman, former manager of the National Communications System, the agency that oversees emergency preparedness, noted, “We had the Bell System at our beck and call.” Indeed, monopolies can seem super convenient for government officials, until they become Boeing.
All of this is a way of saying that it should be obvious at this point that big tech firms like Apple and Google are far too powerful. But if it wasn’t obvious enough yesterday, Chair Lina Khan’s appearance on the Daily Show should give you another data point. If it was up to Apple, that appearance never would have happened. And if Apple isn’t stopped, it soon might be their choice, and not ours. It’s a choice they feel entitled to make for us.
Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
I watched Jon Stewart's interview of Lina Khan on the April 1 episode of The Daily Show. I enjoyed the heck out of it while still learning a few things. Ms. Khan was impressive. She came across as focused and unflappable, delivering her message in a low keyed manner, leaving Jon Stewart to chew up the scenery.
It's nice to see an energized SEC finally enforcing our laws, pushing back against the relentless concentration of corporate power that has been slowly crushing America's spirit and economy.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CnC9JV5YtBY&si=WFJGE96gcrT_Ow6K
This is a video that every American needs to see and digest how monopoly power has transferred an estimated 50Trillion dollars from the middle class and the poor to the 1% and continues to steal from the 90+%. The gop with help from the democrats have ignored enforcement of existing anti-trust for the last 40+ Leading to a massive consolidation of corporations giving corporations absolute market power to raise prices generating excess profits for executives and shareholders.
The 1% have used their massive wealth to buy congress and state legislators to pass laws to destroy unions and to stop workers from getting a fair share of corporate profits. Labor produces the products of corporations and are also the consumers that buy products they produce.
Lina Kahn is one of the most brilliant individuals in government fighting a fight for all Americans to take back the American economy from the arrogant and greedy rich. Everyone needs to understand the US economy is no longer a free market economy. The American economy is monopolistic where competition is no longer determines the prices consumers pay in the market. Corporations now set prices in collusion with each other, living consumers with no option other than not purchasing consumer products they no longer can afford.
This is a video that needs to be seen by everyone. Pass it on.