Nearly Half of Voters Support FTC’s New Task Force to Examine Tech Monopolies
From Morning Consult:
Republican voters are 5 percentage points more likely than voters overall to favor the creation of the FTC task force, with 52 percent supporting the move. Caleb Watney, tech and innovation fellow at free-market think tank R Street Institute, said the share of GOP support for regulation makes sense, considering recent criticisms of alleged anti-conservative bias leveled against tech platforms such as Twitter Inc.
“We’ve seen a lot of attention paid on Fox News, and Tucker Carlson has done a lot of monologues on bias against conservatives, so in some ways it’s not surprising,” Watney said.
Watney said he expects the task force to first review previous merger cases — such as Facebook Inc.’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram and its 2014 deal with WhatsApp — and see what can be learned from them. But Watney, who generally supports moves to foster competition that don’t rely on antitrust measures, also said he hopes the new FTC group takes an “interdisciplinary approach” and includes a mix of technologists and economists in its decision-making.
