Top Conservatives Launch Internet Accountability Project to Rein in Big Tech

Rachel Bovard, a top conservative leader, told Breitbart News on Sunday her new organization, the Internet Accountability Project (IAP), will be dedicated to reining in big tech.

Mike Davis, a former top Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, and Rachel Bovard (pictured), a conservative policy leader, announced this week they have formed the IAP to help rein in big tech.

IAP is a 501(c)(4) advocacy group that will focus on activism, lobbying, and education on issues relating to sex trafficking on social media platforms, bias and political censorship, and antitrust issues related to big tech’s dominance on the Internet.

Bovard told Breitbart News the organization will help highlight conservative lawmakers who have led on big tech-related issues such as Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

“The goal is to give coverage to the members who really want to address this issue and also to create some transparency around the impact that big tech is having on society. From a larger cultural conversation, but also to the really granular stuff, like allowing users to sell steroids on their platform. Or the role of sex trafficking and human trafficking on social media,” Bovard said.

“Enough is enough. It’s time to re-boot Big Tech, upgrade and reformat the sweetheart laws that protect them, and enforce the antitrust, consumer- and employee-protection, and similar laws already on the books,” Davis confirmed in a statement released this week.

The conservative policy leader also explained she hopes IAP will help “rebalance” the conversation on big tech away from groups that have taken money from big tech and have become beholden on issues relating to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, political censorship on the Internet, and antitrust.

“We really want to pull back the curtain on a lot of those things, but I think in the short term we want to rebalance the conversation the Right to some extent because a lot of it now is dominated by groups that are taking money from big tech. So we want to be a group that does not want to take money from big tech and therefore not beholden to or shill for them,” she added.

Google and Facebook’s influence extends to many powerful conservative and libertarian organizations in Washington, DC. Recent reports have revealed that Google provides “substantial funding” to the R Street Institute, TechFreedom, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Google, as well as Facebook, also donate to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Sen. Hawley told Breitbart News in a recent interview Google and Facebook have purchased “enormous influence” through funding think tanks in D.C.

“Google and Facebook have purchased enormous influence, their own sycophants; they purchased economists; they have funded think tanks. It’s unbelievable. I give them credit, they know how to play the swamp game. They have an army of swamp creatures who are out there singing the party line — the big tech line,” Hawley said.

Bovard continued, suggesting that big tech’s influence serves as as an existential threat to Americans’ liberty.

She explained,”When you start to recognize that massive, unaccountable corporations awash in billions of dollars, owning the data of hundreds of millions of Americans, and controlling our cultural and political conversations in unprecedented ways, it gives you pause and there are those on the Right that are asking the question now: have we now empowered these private corporations so much that they are a threat to our liberty.”

Bovard said, “That’s the real basis for what we are trying to do. I think there is a sort of reflexiveness that, ‘private companies are private companies, you can’t do any of this,'” referring to using regulation and antitrust against big tech.

She concluded, saying that big tech has “more power than the government does to some extent, and I think it’s totally appropriate for policymakers” have a conversation about how to rein in big tech.