Since every newsletter is doing a tech hearing preview today, I'll make two suggestions:

1) Subscribe to @benthompson's Stratechery and read his excellent take.

2) Competition policy should be about competition and will fail at fixing other issues.

There is a lot of loose talk among the tech-critical journalist set about antitrust being a prerequisite to getting their preferred content moderation policies implemented. This is not a position supported by logic or evidence, and comes out of ignoring the breadth of issues.

There are a whole host of bad things that happen when people are able to communicate online. I'll again use my class syllabus to outline the fraction of online harms we can cover in a quarter. Despite what you might read, every communication platform has most of these issues.

Some of these problems scale with the larger reach of larger platforms, like disinformation, the celebration of self-harm or terrorist recruiting. For others, like targeted harassment, child sexual exploitation and criminal conspiracies, harm generally does not scale with size.

There are both fixed and marginal costs in detecting and stopping these abuses. The fixed costs are often technological and product-based, as well as having a base of expertise in some of the more esoteric issues. The marginal cost is content moderators and investigators.

It is impossible to simplify this down to "bigger is better", as I expect we will hear from Zuck, or "bigger is worst", as we are hearing from our media friends and likely most Senators. It just doesn't work that way, and anybody saying either hasn't really done the work.

Our collective views of these problems are distorted by what the media decides to cover. Take for example, one of the most interesting disinformation ops of the last couple of years, Secondary Infektion:

https://secondaryinfektion.org/downloads/secondary-infektion-report.pdf

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Operation-Secondary-Infektion_English.pdf

This was a four-year Russian campaign across 300 different websites and platforms to subtly bend global views of NATO and Ukraine. It got almost no coverage in the media, although @AllMattNYT @SangerNYT and @nicoleperlroth did mention it in this roundup: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/politics/russia-hacking-disinformation-election.html

This kind of campaign complicates the discussion of these problems, as it was only discovered because Facebook took down a small component and notified researchers, who were able to find the other affected sites. Much like our own work on the GRU: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/potemkin-pages-personas-blog

On a much more practical note, it seems highly unlikely that both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren would get their desired content moderation outcomes out of the same anti-trust remedy. It's like breaking up Toyota to get higher fuel efficiency standards.

So, if (like me) you think Big Tech is suppressing the emergence of competitors via restrictive platform rules, access to huge amounts of data and strategic acquisitions, then that should be the focus. Antitrust is not a mechanism for weighing the hard equities of online speech.