ANTITRUST: Silicon Valley May Rue the Day it Called for Government Intervention Against Microsoft. “Facebook, Google, Apple, and others are now facing the sort of regulatory and antitrust animus once leveled at Bill Gates’ company.”

All good things have got to end, and Clark documents how Washington started to take an interest in West Coast tech. Ironically, it was Silicon Valley who came a-calling first, “in the 1990s with the antitrust case against Microsoft, and again more recently in the battle with internet service providers over net neutrality.” In each case, he notes, the alarm was sounded by other tech sector people and now, “they entangled the federal government in their industry in ways that are coming back to haunt them.”

Clark writes that “net neutrality” rules were aimed at telecom firms (especially cable companies providing internet access) and promulgated and pushed by online bandwidth hogs including Netflix, Google, eBay, and Amazon. It was all good to start regulating the internet as long as it was the pipes being regulated and not what flowed through them (indeed, the rallying cry of net neutrality was that all data should be treated equally!). But that’s not the way it played out. The Open Internet Order of 2015 has been rescinded (that’s a good thing, incidentally) and now Washington is far more concerned with what’s being transmitted rather than what ISP is transmitting it or at what speed it’s being sent

However noble or well-meaning Net Neutrality supporters were at the start, it soon got coopted as a rent-seeking measure by the above-mentioned “bandwidth hogs.” And now that Washington’s nose is under the tent, good luck ever getting it out.