Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) appeared on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday with Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle over the weekend, slamming efforts to pass the widely-criticized Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) through the Senate.
The JCPA, which Breitbart News has covered extensively, allows the nation’s largest and most pro-censorship media companies to band together in a cartel to collude with Big Tech companies.
The cartel would be able to extract more revenue for the establishment corporate media from tech companies through arbitration agreements, as well as deepen its backroom ties with Silicon Valley, a relationship that already informally exists and which has consistently been used to push censorship of both the media and Big Tech’s competitors.
“I really dislike the JCPA,” said Sen. Lee. “I don’t believe in cartels. It’s with good reason that our antitrust laws are very harsh on cartels, offering in some cases criminal penalties against cartels.”
“We’re authorizing here for two of the entities that are perhaps most hostile to conservatives; newspapers and Big Tech companies — we’re allowing them to form cartels in that industry. For newspapers to form cartels ostensibly for the purposes for negotiating the manner in which they’ll be compensated by Big Tech companies. It’s a dangerous game to start authorizing cartels for that purpose.”
“Some who have been backing this say this will somehow hold Big Tech to account. There’s no evidence of that whatsoever, moreover the way they’ve drafted this… This will disproportionately benefit the large newspapers to the detriment of the smaller newspapers. So even if you were comfortable, which I am not, with the formation of cartels for this purpose, it still would be a bad idea, because you’re treating, really unfairly, the smaller companies, and it would not solve the underlying problem.”
“I hope to defeat this thing. I hope that it won’t come up. I think lame duck sessions are, generally speaking, a bad time to legislate, and I think we should be doing everything we can to stop this thing.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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