Inside Republican infighting over the proposed Big Tech antitrust bills, as some co-sponsor bills while others argue the bills don't address alleged bias
Apple, Google, FB & Amazon — see the very real possibility that their power can finally be constrained. They're waging an all-out lobbyist effort to stop it. Right now, the 2 key obstacles are McCarthy & Jordan: https://www.nytimes.com/... Jonathan Martin / @jmartnyt : This is even better: “We've got a beef with all Big Tech in the sense of the censorship they have of conservatives now,” Jordan told Fox Business on Tuesday. Jordan added, however, that the antitrust bills coming to a vote are sponsored by “four impeachment managers” Melanie Zanona / @mzanona : Jeff Miller — a lobbyist who is close w/ McCarthy, often comes to House GOP meetings & reps tech clients — has been aggressively lobbying members to oppose the antitrust bills, per sources. One Republican said Miller left a particularly offensive voicemail on a lawmaker's phone. Glenn Greenwald / @ggreenwald : House Republicans have publicly railed against the evils of Big Tech power. Now there's bipartisan legislation to dilute monopoly power & a new FTC chief ready to join. But 2 key House Republicans are stopping it: Kevin McCarthy & Jim Jordan. https://www.politico.com/... Melanie Zanona / @mzanona : House Rs are sparring over Congress's Big Tech crackdown. Some Rs have blamed a McCarthy ally/lobbyist for working to tank the bills, while others say colleagues went behind leaders' backs to hash out a bad deal w/ Dems. w/ @Olivia_Beavers & @birnbaum_e https://www.politico.com/... @politico : Republicans want to go after Big Tech. But they're now openly clashing with each other over a bipartisan effort to do just that. https://www.politico.com/... Rep. Jim Jordan / @jim_jordan : Big Tech merged with Big Government - radical Dems' bills would transform US Our latest op-ed with @MarkMeadows. https://www.foxnews.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The fight has a paper trail: two months ago the House Judiciary Committee approved a 450-page report accusing Big Tech of buying and crushing smaller rivals meant as a legislative blueprint, and Ken Buck emerged as the Republican carrying that blueprint into bipartisan bills. But a year earlier, a [[a:956206|confidential GOP memo urged lawmakers to frame Big Tech around alleged political bias rather than competition]] — and that framing is exactly what Jim Jordan is invoking now, dismissing the bills because their sponsors are 'four impeachment managers.'
So the caucus is fighting on two incompatible theories of the case: Buck's competition argument versus the censorship grievance, with McCarthy and Jordan holding the procedural keys and Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon funding an all-out lobbying push — including lobbyist Jeff Miller working House Republicans directly — to keep it that way.
First-order effects
- Buck's bipartisan coalition can't move the bills through the House without winning over McCarthy and Jordan, whose objections are ideological rather than substantive — so the immediate battleground is the GOP conference, not the floor vote.
- Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon's lobbying operation gets a cheap win if the caucus splits itself: opposing four impeachment managers lets Jordan cast a competition bill as a partisan score-settling exercise.
Second-order effects
- Jeff Miller's aggressive lobbying of House Republicans shows where the platforms' money is aimed — not at Democrats, who largely back the bills, but at exploiting the GOP's internal censorship-versus-competition rift.
- The same self-preference bill Buck backs later stalls in the Senate too, where some Democrats resist ahead of midterms (resistance from Senate Democrats worried about the 2022 elections) — meaning the platforms face no single choke point but a gauntlet of veto players on both sides.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, it does hold: the 2022 bipartisan push collapses under industry lobbying and congressional dysfunction (the 2022 push derailed by lobbying, ads, PR and donations), and by 2023 Buck himself concedes the GOP plans no tougher rules on Google, Amazon or Apple (Buck's admission the GOP won't pursue tougher rules).
- Structurally, the censorship grievance becomes the durable veto over competition policy inside one party — leaving gatekeeper power unconstrained by legislation and pushing accountability toward courts and regulators like Lina Khan's FTC instead.
The trend: US antitrust action against Big Tech is being decided less by bipartisan majorities than by whichever internal party faction controls the gate — here, the GOP's censorship wing blocking its own competition reformers.