It may be summer, but we well know that tech – and rust – never rest. Last week, “Former President Donald Trump, who has been banned from most major social media platforms, announced a class-action lawsuit against tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, along with their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai,” Yahoo reported. “…In court documents, Mr. Trump’s legal team argued that the tech firms amounted to state actors and thus the First Amendment applied to them. Legal experts said similar arguments had repeatedly failed in the courts before,” said the New York Times.

But Palace Intrigue noted a while back that in April, 2012, “Barack Obama himself admitted that the government helped Google and Facebook get off the ground. The government was present at the beginning when both companies were created.”

 

The tech cabal is somewhat under assault. “Biden signed a sweeping executive order that targets big tech mergers but includes a provision favored by most tech giants,” the Washington Free Beacon reported (Biden Antitrust Executive Order Has Major Giveaway for Tech Giants). “The order instructs the Federal Trade Commission to more closely monitor merger attempts by “dominant internet platforms” and to restrict how tech companies can exploit users’ personal information. But it also recommends that the Federal Communication Commission restore net neutrality rules, which prevent internet providers from making distinctions among users.”

The latter is a huge giveaway to Big Tech. To refresh your memory, as we reported back in 2019 (Was Net Neutrality Truly Neutral? Here’s the Score Card), it was under Net Neutrality that innovation was stifled (by the cabal), IPOs practically came to a grinding halt while Big Tech’s coffers burgeoned, and as we witnessed with the silencing/deplatforming of a sitting President, we saw who truly controlled that critical so-called ‘last mile’ – which, truth be told, in the case of the cabal, is mindshare and the information that could reach users.

 

And in case you missed it, despite copying innovations from the likes of, say Club House, the cabal aren’t exactly crushing the competition, as they did in the days of Net Neutrality. In fact, this just in: : Individuals Now Spend More Time On TikTok Than YouTube, Facebook, Netflix. And we don’t exactly see Twitter’s Spaces or Facebook’s audio-only rival eating Club House’s lunch, and lest we forget, Facebook decimated Snap while Net Neutrality was alive and well. The cabal was all-powerful.

 

While The Information reported back in May, re Spaces, “Any Twitter user with 600 or more followers will now be able to host a live audio conversation. The expansion gives it a big leg up over Clubhouse. Even though Twitter’s user growth has slowed, the company still counts just under 200 million daily active users compared to 10 million users for Clubhouse as of February.”

Forest through the trees: with all of the censorship that Big Tech has been practicing, their new competitive entries aren’t exactly killing the upstarts. At this point, consumers know that while Big Tech may beckon with that come hither, they’re wielding a sledgehammer behind their backs, so that would be no. No, thank you.

 

No one stays on top forever, as we well know, and as we’ve witnessed with both Club House and Zoom, it’s never game over. It may take some time before the sun sets on Big Tech, and seems that we’re in anything but the summer doldrums. There’s little doubt that the cabal is using its influence to reinstate Net Neutrality by any means necessary. But the climate is changing, as is the consumer’s appetite for the shenanigans of the cabal. Once bitten, twice shy.  It may be getting hot out there across the social media spectrum, but consumers have grown weary of the threat of being left out in the cold. Onward and forward.