Peter Schweizer on the Masters of the Universe: ‘Google Is Editing What People See and Don’t See’
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Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer appeared on Breitbart News Daily with Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow to discuss his #1 selling book Secret Empires and the influence of large tech companies such as Google.
Peter Schweizer appeared alongside Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily recently to discuss his new book Secret Empires and the vast reach that Silicon Valley tech giants such as Google and Facebook possess. Discussing the influence that these companies have, Alex Marlow asked Schweizer “What are we supposed to do about it? Peter, I’m an editor and commentator but I’m not gonna be the person that’s gonna lead the charge activism wise, what do people do beyond just generic raising awareness and reporting the facts like you and I do, have there been any solutions government or otherwise which have been proposed to deal with these ‘Masters of the Universe’?”
Schweizer replied: “Yeah, that’s a great question, there are a couple of them and I’m at the point right now where I’m not quite sure what the best policy path forward is. I know some that I don’t think are the solution, one is, some people, particularly on the political left, have said ‘Google is so powerful we need to declare that it’s a public utility, and it needs to be run like a public utility’ and the problem I have with that Alex is that anyone who has dealt with a public utility knows how ineffective, unresponsive, the inability to progress int erms of technology, just knows that the quality of the services you recieve are going to decline, that’s just the nature of what you get declaring a public utility.”
“So, I’m personally not in favor of that,” continued Schweizer. “Others have proposed, and there’s been legislation introduced on this which I think is very interesting, which is that Google is right now unregulated because it is classified as an Internet company so they are not regulated, they are essentially immune to libel laws, there’s a whole host of other things that they don’t even have to deal with because they simply declare themselves as an Internet company. Well a lot of critics say, ‘well no you’re not an internet company, you’re a media company because you are editing the algorithm, the algorithm is being edited and it is being skewed in a direction, not just giving people logical search results you are actually editing what they see and what they don’t see and that makes you a media company.’”
“And if they become a media company they suddenly are subject to certain regulatory behavior, one of them would be for example libel laws, you would be subject to libel laws at Google if you were declared a media company as much as the New York Times or Breitbart or any other media company would. That strikes me as an interesting solution but I think that the biggest thing that people can do right now as these policy decisions are being debated is form and let people know that this is going on. Tell your neighbors and your friends, its amazing to me how people are embracing Google, you’ve now got the devices that are being placed in people’s homes where people ask them questions, all of that is being used to manipulate you in some way.”
Listen to the full conversation here.
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