“There are simply no more options” before the day of the inauguration, said an aide to the Republican Party Congress on Monday.
“I don’t think Trump has many options,” said Rachel Bovard, senior policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing political advocacy group. “If he publishes an executive order, it will simply be reversed … and the same goes for Republicans. They have no power in any significant way now. “
Responding to recent tech companies’ actions is still top priority for Republicans now, behind rating their reaction to the Capitol riots and the battle for impeachment, said a second Republican Congressional aide. But the aide said the party, traditionally opposed to regulatory burdens on business, does not have a clear consensus on how to move forward on the technology front.
“I don’t think anyone has come together around any specific response,” said the aide.
All of this results in a major loss of influence for a party whose lawmakers have attracted Silicon Valley CEOs to countless hearings in recent years – and for the president whose nominees filed two major antitrust suits last fall against Google and Facebook. Washington’s power struggle with Silicon Valley is still very much alive, but the next Democratic Congress and President-elect Joe Biden will largely decide where to go next.
One of the only possible regulatory paths left is a regulatory effort that Federal Communications Communication announced in October, requested by Trump, that could tighten legal protections for the online industry. But the last FCC Trump-era meeting is on Wednesday, and President Ajit Pai said last week that he does not plan to bring it up.
Trump’s commercial adviser, Peter Navarro, punctured Pai’s decision. “Backbones missing in swamp DC,” he tweeted on the weekend.
In any case, some of the critics of the big tech companies have tried to retaliate. Parler opened an antitrust suit on Monday against Amazon, which canceled the platform’s web hosting service for what it called a failure to moderate the violent rhetoric among its users. Trump supporters called for a protest on Monday morning outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, although local news says it attracted a small crowd. An ISP in Idaho blocked access to Twitter and Facebook for what it called censorship.
Trump has hinted that he may have other tricks up his sleeve. On Friday night, when Twitter permanently suspended his personal and campaign accounts, he said in a White House statement that he was evaluating a series of responses, including the possibility of creating “our own platform in the near future”.
But for Republicans whose reign in Washington is coming to an end, the main response has been to shout, with some calling for Congress or the Executive to act.
“The decision by Amazon, Google and Apple to block the download or use of Parler by their consumers is dangerous,” tweeted deputy Andy Barr (R-Ky.). “This blatant monopolistic behavior is designed to end the debate and silence conservatives.”
Barr added that he was “calling on the DOJ to start investigating possible antitrust violations by these tech giants.”
Representative Ken Buck (R-Colorado), one of the legislators who lead the House’s bipartisan efforts to update US antitrust laws, said Republican Party officials should direct their anger at companies’ business practices.
“Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple used their monopoly power to censor speech,” he tweeted Sunday. “Until Republicans understand that enforcement of antitrust law is the answer, these companies will continue to abuse their power.”
After Amazon announced Parler’s withdrawal this weekend, Buck tweeted that he will “introduce legislation at this Congress to hold Amazon accountable for its anti-competitive behavior”.
Some Republicans have also indicated that they plan to channel their fury into efforts to reverse or revise a crucial legal liability shield for the online industry, known as Section 230. This is the same law that Trump unsuccessfully demanded last year that Congress repeal, a an appeal that failed to gain traction even in the Senate controlled by the Republican Party.
“I am more determined than ever to remove Big Tech (Twitter) Section 230 protections, which made them immune to lawsuits,” Senator Lindsey Graham (RS.C.) tweeted in response to Twitter banning Trump.
But with Democrats set to lead these negotiations, the Republican Party’s complaints about ideological bias will have much less influence. Instead, the anger of Democrats in Silicon Valley is driven primarily by issues such as political falsehoods, hate speech and threats of online violence.
Trump’s efforts to use the executive’s powers to hammer social media companies for allegedly censoring conservatives have basically run out, even before Republicans lose the White House and Senate.
The president signed an executive order in May asking federal agencies to reduce the legal protections in Section 230, which protects online platforms from lawsuits for content posted by its users and gives them ample scope to withdraw it. But neither the FCC nor the Federal Trade Commission took any significant action on that request, and Democrats in Congress rejected the idea of repealing the law.
“I think it needs to be revised, but you cannot revoke it or else you will destroy the protections for small businesses and entrepreneurs who are working to move up,” Mayor Nancy Pelosi told a news conference in December.
Trump’s calls for a total repeal have also caused confusion among some Congressional Republicans, according to an aide, as lawmakers from both parties have long pushed for change, but have not repealed the law.
“The handbook is completely torn” in Section 230, said a Congressional advisor to the Republican Party.
The issue of prejudice is also unlikely to reach any of the floods of federal and state government antitrust cases that hit the tech giants – although supporters of Trump and Parler say the decisions to eliminate them are a clear example of abuse of silicon Valley market dominance.
For example, the antitrust lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and 11 states against Google in October did not include allegations of ideological discrimination, despite the hopes of some Republicans. In the meantime, state attorney generals continued to investigate Google for antitrust issues related to the Play Store – the same app store from which he expelled Parler last week.
But this multi-state investigation is bipartisan, led by attorney generals from Utah, New York, Tennessee and North Carolina, and states have sought to maintain politically tense aspects of their antitrust complaints. Democratic attorney-generals are unlikely to support a lawsuit that makes Parler’s removal a key part of an antitrust case against Google.
One thing that may need to happen before the Republican Party can really bring consequences to the tech giants: Republicans need to agree with each other on how they want to deal with corporate behavior, said Bovard, adding that the party has long been divided between factions .
“I think their base is upset, frankly, that they feel they have wasted four years of chest beats, audiences and rhetoric, but no real action,” she said. “So I think now is the time for Republicans to develop their political positions so that, the minute they reappear in a position of power, they have a political agenda that they are ready to enact.”
Leah Nylen contributed to this report.