In 1986 an item in the New Republic decreed that “Worthwhile
Canadian Initiative,” a headline that appeared in The New York Times’ op-ed
page, was “possibly the most boring headline ever written.” Seeking a different
sort of reaction, I briefly considered titling this op-ed “Worthwhile Josh
Hawley Initiative,” a headline that I suspect would elicit fury rather than
boredom from many readers of the Times.
اضافة اعلان
As recently as a few months ago, Hawley’s populist forays
and critiques of corporate power were eyed with suspicion but also a certain
interest by people on the left. But after the Missouri senator’s cynical
election challenge, his famous fist pump on January 6 and his unrepentant
attitude after Trump dead-enders stormed the halls of Congress, it is fair to
say that he’s not any liberal’s idea of a thoughtful Republican anymore.
Nevertheless, you can loathe Hawley and still find his
latest policy proposal noteworthy. Titled the Bust Up Big Tech Act, it’s really
more of a targeted broadside aimed at Amazon. It would prohibit companies that
run online marketplaces and search engines with a certain size and reach from
selling or advertising their own goods on those sites, and it would also
prohibit such companies from providing online hosting services for other
companies.
The provisions could apply to Google as well as Amazon, but
they are clearly aimed at key aspects of the Amazonian imperium. The first would
strip away the company’s ability to sell its own goods on Amazon Marketplace,
where it currently competes with third-party sellers. The second would force it
to spin off Amazon Web Services, its lucrative business that sells cloud
hosting to many other companies.
Hawley’s sketch is not about to become law. But his
proposals offer a good entry point for a discussion about Amazon’s
extraordinary power — a power that’s only increased in our pandemic year of
closed stores and endless one-click ordering.
Right now, there are three broad reasons to be concerned
about the world that Amazon’s power is creating. The first, the old-school
antitrust concern, is that the power is bad for free and fair business
competition, because
Jeff Bezos’ empire can use its multiplatform power to
strong-arm its rivals — by, say, forcing a company whose products interface
with Amazon’s Alexa to share more customer data or risk losing access to the
Amazon sales platform, to cite an allegation reported in
The Wall Street Journal just last week.
Or alternatively, it can use that power to straightforwardly
undercut its competition: For instance, by scooping up sales data from
companies that sell on its website to help the behemoth offer competing
products, something that Amazon employees have done notwithstanding an official
company policy forbidding it. Running web services for rival companies may
expand the possibilities for this kind of abuse, because it means that one arm
of Amazon has access to all kinds of crucial internet-use data about businesses
that other arms might be competing against.
The second concern, the anxiety felt most sharply by
conservatives, is that it is bad for cultural and political freedom to have one
company so dominant over so many spaces and platforms. If Amazon decides not to
carry certain books on its marketplaces because they offend progressive norms,
its dominant position in bookselling will obviously affect their likelihood of
finding a publisher in the first place. If Amazon decides to kick a company off
Amazon Web Services, as it did with the social-media app Parler after the
January 6 riot, the nature of web hosting means that the affected company might
not survive (though Parler is still alive). Even if the specific decisions are
justifiable, the concentration of cultural power is a threat to free debate.
The final anxiety, meanwhile, is about what the Amazon
business model does to the American worker and the American social fabric. This
is the great concern of Alec MacGillis’ new book “Fulfillment: Winning and
Losing in One-Click America,” a rich sociology of the world that Amazon has
made. He spends a certain amount of time on the company’s anti-competitive
power, the abuses occasioned by its size and scale and profit-seeking. But his
central story is about the way that a business that cuts out economic middlemen
and shared spaces of commerce and circulation, from brick-and-mortar Main
Streets to shopping malls, inherently contributes to our grim geographic
polarization — in which service-sector regions exist to sort and package
consumer goods to ship to wealthy tech hubs, while midsize cities and
middle-class communities decay or disappear.
MacGillis’ book is not a policy manifesto, and while he
takes note of specific political decisions that have furthered Amazon’s
imperialism, his overall story has a bleak and ineluctable momentum and a
pessimistic end. And understandably so, since none of the obvious policy
responses, whether from critics of “woke capital” like Hawley or the
antitrust-and-labor left, seem commensurate to the transformation MacGillis
describes. One-click America is being forged, in the last analysis, by human
nature — by the near-universal appeal of convenience, the magic of having the
thing you want when you want it, which people are likely to choose even if it
means that regional department stores evanesce and local businesses decline.
A full response to this kind of Amazonification probably
needs to come from policies and movements with broader aims than just
restraining Bezosian power — whether that means industrial policy that tries to
seed the Middle American landscape with middle-class jobs, a
telecommuting-driven dispersion from the big cities that spreads social capital
around or even a period of social and religious renewal that spurs the upper
class to new forms of service and missionary work.
With that said, though, just because a policy is
insufficient doesn’t make it useless. Would the heartland still be hollowed
out, the new economy’s capitals still flush and gilded, if Amazon were several
powerful companies rather than just one? No doubt. Would one-click America
still be polarizing if more money flowed to sellers on Amazon Marketplace and
workers in Amazon warehouses, and a little less to Bezos and shareholders?
Certainly. But a weaker Amazon still seems as if it might be better, on the
margins, for a lot of people, a lot of smaller companies and a lot of would-be
innovators, and combining left-wing and right-wing fears about its power yields
a pretty reasonable critique.
The question is whether that critique can build a coalition
strong enough to overcome not just Amazon’s direct lobbying power but also the
general popularity its conveniences have earned. And the answer is that it
probably can’t, unless the anti-Amazon left figures out a way to work with
figures like Hawley, and figures like Hawley with the left.
That is a scenario that January 6 made much less likely. But
no less desirable, if the alternative is to imagine Jeff Bezos fist-pumping,
forever.
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