As Congress inches closer to passing an infrastructure deal, more details are emerging about the specifics, including tens of billions of dollars that may soon be funding an expansion of America’s broadband network. But while this may sound good in theory, could there be a potential dark side to this proposed project?
In the Daily Caller yesterday, Jon Schweppe, director of policy and government affairs for American Principles Project, noted that Google in particular stands to benefit significantly from this funding, a highly convenient development given how their actions last year boosted Democratic candidates:
The Wall Street Journal reported on how Google manually manipulates search results. Mike Wacker, a former Google engineer turned whistleblower, detailedmany of these efforts and suggested that CEO Sundar Pichai may have lied to Congress when he claimed, “We don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.” Google has also blacklisted conservative news sites and banned conservative content creators from YouTube.
Given Google’s monopoly on Internet search and its ability to shape public opinion, the tech giant’s suppression of speech and expression in the digital public square clearly amounts to election interference. And it is hard to argue that it didn’t play a role in determining the election’s outcome. Epstein suggested Google swung millions of votes in 2016, but Joe Biden won by just 43,000 votes in 2020 when counting the margins in Wisconsin (20,700), Georgia (11,800), and Arizona (10,500). If just one third of one percent of voters in those states had switched their votes, Trump would be in the Oval Office right now.
So why would Google make such a concerted effort to swing the election? […] Google already monopolizes search, the most powerful service riding over broadband networks. But what if they could control a huge swath of the underlying infrastructure itself and harvest the data that comes with that control? As Axios recently reported, Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which includes significant spending on broadband infrastructure, “revives a Google dream.”
You can read Jon Schweppe’s full op-ed here.
