Populist Politics and Digital Antitrust
It is a common observation that we currently are in a populist political moment. The populist challenge to the laws, norms and institutions of liberalism is apparent across a range of indicators. These include the rise of street movements such as France’s Gilles Jeunes, the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union in the UK, the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency, and the election of leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Rodrigo Duterte in The Philippines.
Across Europe, populist parties now account for about 25 per cent of votes in elections in European states, as compared to about 5–7 per cent in the 1990s. The declining vote of the traditional parties of the centre-right and centre-left was apparent in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, where the three leading traditional blocs (conservatives, liberals, and socialists/social-democrats) received 52.5% of all votes, to hold 55.2% of seats. As recently as 2009, these three blocs accounted for 72.4% of votes and 75.6% of seats.
There is a debate about whether populism is primarily driven by economic or cultural factors. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin refer to the ‘Four D’s’ as drivers of populism:
1. Distrust of political elites, anger at corruption, and perceived exclusion from the institutions of liberal democracy;
2. Deprivation, in the face of rising economic inequalities, stagnant real wages, job insecurity and declining social provision;
3. Destruction — real or perceived — of national cultures and traditions, value systems and authority structures, and historically embedded ‘ways of life’;
4. Dealignment of citizens as voters from the major political parties, and from class and other societal cleavages associated with those parties.
Populism is often seen in terms of a backlash against globalization, as manifested in free trade agreements, mass migration, and cosmopolitan identities. It typically takes a nationalist form, but there exist left-populist movements that champion a return to politics and popular sovereignty and critique the ‘post-democratic’ mindset of ‘Third Way’ politics, and well as the more apparent nationalist populism of the right as identified both by its supporters and its opponents.
The overarching feature of populist politics, is anti-elitism, and a championing of ‘the people’ in opposition to increasingly distant and unaccountable elites. Who constitutes an ‘elite’ is an endless source of contention and contestation. For those on the left, elites are bankers and financiers, capitalists, and those politicians who receive financial support from such interests and provide ideological support in return. ‘The Establishment’, by this reckoning, is broadly synonymous with what Marxists would term the ruling class.
For those on the political right, or representing a nationalist viewpoint, capitalists are part of the elite but primarily in terms of their championing of a ‘globalist’ perspective: it is less incongruous from this perspective that leaders of anti-elitist politics, such as Trump in the U.S. or Nigel Farage in the U.K., ware themselves obviously wealthy people. Elites, by contrast, tend to be understood as figures such as judges, intellectuals, celebrities, politicians and others they view as usurpers of the popular will. This can include big business, as part of a wider distrust of political elites, anger at corruption, and perceived exclusion from the institutions of liberal democracy and the benefits of the global market economy.
The debate about populism and digital platforms has tended to revolve around whether social media has been a catalyst for populist movement and, if so, is that something to be concerned about. The creation of ‘networked publics’ that social media platforms have been associated with, and its correlation with the ongoing shrinkage of traditional news media outlets and professional journalism, has triggered debates about ‘post-truth’ politics, the proliferation of ‘fake news’, and the ‘balkanisation’ of rival political and ideological perspectives within ‘filter bubbles’ arising from the algorithmic sorting of news. But there is also the extent to which those working within digital platforms themselves constitute an elite, and the politics of populism that increasingly inserts itself into debates about platform regulation.
The U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein admonished Google, Facebook and Twitter for failing to have their CEOs attend the November 2017 Congressional hearings on alleged Russian interference in U.S. electoral politics, she observed that the companies did not seem to ‘get’; the rising anger of Congress, and people in the regions they represent, towards the perceived unaccountability and arrogance of the tech giants.
This could be glossed over during the time of the Obama Presidency, as there was a tacit acceptance at the upper echelons of the administration that digital platforms were complicated, how they worked was beyond the wit of elected representatives, and the opacity of these businesses was a necessary trade-off for the economic benefits that advances in digital technology would bring.
The lid has been well and truly blown off that perspective under the Trump Administration, with Trump himself periodically alluding to the complicity of Silicon Valley with the ‘Deep State’, while conservatives see Silicon Valley as a bastion of West Coast liberalism, and as a ‘one-party state’ in the words of entrepreneur Peter Theil.
The major populist challenge to digital platforms comes, however, from the political left, in the form of a renewal of the antitrust movement. Lina Khan pointed to the unfettered expansion of Amazon as the dominant player in electronic commerce, through a business model that foregoes short-term returns for long-term market dominance. She argues that Amazon pursues data-driven integration across business segments that competitors are unable to replicate, in order to acquire monopoly power in platform markets without triggering competition policy concerns, as it does not manifest itself in higher prices for consumers.
Tim Wu pointed to major mergers and acquisitions such as Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google’s acquisition of the online mapping company Waze, as well as the creation of “clone” digital products that undermined potential competitors, to make the case for renewal of antitrust law in the age of digital platforms and multisided markets.
This ‘neo-Brandeisian moment’ in public policy debates has found political voice in the campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential nomination. This is significant since a tacit alliance between the Democrats and Silicon Valley has been a feature of liberal, centre-left politics in the U.S. from the mid-1980s to the present.
While CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg have declared their determination to fight Warren’s proposals, they also have some support among those working in big tech companies. With Donald Trump facing the threat of impeachment even before the 2020 election, and the campaign of Joe Biden appearing to lose steam, we could be set for a new moment in the interaction between populist politics and the regulation of digital platforms.
Written by Terry Flew. This article forms a part of ongoing work being undertaken by Professor Terry Flew (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT), Professor Nicolas Suzor (Faculty of Law, QUT) Dr. Fiona Martin, Associate Professor Tim Dwyer (Department of Media and Communication, University of Sydney), and Dr. Rosalie Gillett (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT) as part of a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Platform Governance: Rethinking Internet Regulation as Media Policy (Australian Research Council Discovery-Project (DP190100222–2019–2021).
