Marlow invited Paxton’s comments on Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) proposed regulatory response to political censorship and manipulation of access to information the world’s largest technology companies have deployed.
Paxton replied, “We definitely are looking at [DeSantis’s proposal]. We’re trying to encourage our legislature to do something similar [in Texas], because I feel like [Big Tech] have had an exemption from liability that they shouldn’t have had, especially being in the monopolistic position they are in.”
“Our focus is on lawsuits,” Paxton continued. “We’ve sued Google for antitrust violations, and we think we’ve absolutely got a case that will win, and very likely, there [will] be other companies [doing] this process [that we will] learn have done the same thing [and] that are in the very same position.”
“The focus of our lawsuit is called ad tech, which means we’re going after them because they control almost all of the advertising on the Internet,” Paxton remarked. He described Google’s digital advertising business model as presenting a conflict of interest between the company’s representation of both buyers and sellers of Internet advertising.
“[Google represents] the buyers of advertising, the sellers of advertising, and they control the exchange,” Paxton stated. “It would be like Goldman Sachs owning the only exchange and representing all the buyers and sellers at the same time, knowing all the information, and therefore they can massively profit at the expense of these business owners who then have to pass on those costs to consumers. So consumers are paying an exorbitantly high price for use of the Internet without even knowing it.”
Paxton previously described Google’s dominance of Internet advertising as the financial heart of the company’s other de facto monopolies. Antitrust legal action against this line of business, he added, is crucial to addressing the technology company’s left-wing political censorship and manipulation of online information.
“[Big Tech] is controlling the narrative [and] what information is getting to consumers,” Paxton stated. “There’s very little way to get around them because they have such dominance on the Internet. … We’ve worked with some of our international partners in talking about some of these antitrust issues. There’s a concern all over the world because as you can see, these companies are so dominant [and] powerful. They are wealthier than most countries in the world, and they have this bent towards controlling information and what we think, see, and how we take in news.”
Digital censorship and manipulation of information are reflective of Big Tech’s and the broader left’s lack of confidence in their own abilities to persuade the public in an open space of ideas, Paxton asserted.
“[Big Tech] is so afraid of hearing the other side,” Paxton held. “They want to shut it off, which means to me, that they’re afraid of that story. … If it was all just ludicrous and it was a joke, why would anybody take it seriously? The reason they take it seriously is that they know it’s true. They know that it has an effect on people and that some of it actually works, and so they’re trying to cut it off because they’re afraid of people knowing the truth.”
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