This is an uncomfortable day. You can say your own thoughts about those and other stories that. Make the big tech monopolies come under scrutiny and cross talk. Hello and welcome to crossfire all Things Considered im Peter Lavelle the time come for google and other Big Tech Companies theres a growing consensus the near monopoly status of many of these companies is bad for competition bad for the consumer and even for freedom of speach. No doubt Silicon Valley is lowering of. Cross talking big tech im joined by my guest bill new in london he is a privacy campaigner and c. E. O. Of the cyber crisis firm the crisis team in dallas we have. A wealthy advisor is well is a managing partner at investments and in c. Back we cross to Geoffrey Carr he is the author of inside cyber warfare mapping the cyber underworld and founder of 30 up a video streaming platform right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want i always appreciate let me go to bill in london bill is it time to break up Companies Like google and facebook and we can talk about what should be done if they are maybe they should become Public Utilities go ahead bill in london theres been very left little appetite in the polls for breaking up these come these companies indeed theres been very good less appetite for challenging them in any way because the enormously lucrative in terms of the lobbying that they do know obviously they have a very strong position in the market i think what weve seen very recently with some of the scandals around privacy that these companies are now vulnerable and possibly their future is in play ok the same question to you because we do have 80 and we have standard oil we have microsoft i mean there are precedents out there there are ways about doing this here to create more competition thats what we need more competition and more privacy ok and a little bit more tolerance of people like me conservatives go ahead well and i am one of those those conservatives as well and what the problem has really come because of the privacy issue and because of you know what some people say some political leanings but i love competition but you know on the flip side facebook competed one google competed one and now were going to come in and say you know you did too well so were going to have it and i dont like it i dont either but other people. But buying the competition to destroy competition is not Good Business practices and you know that ok we saw that with these other big standard. You know that we go by their competition and they destroy it ok all right jeffrey the same question to you trying to break. You know im im in favor of google mostly because of the privacy issue google has more google has more data on people than the n. S. A. Than any Government Agency ever dreamed of. It has tracks you across every platform. Is ubiquitous browser therefore if you are a lot fewer any company anywhere in the world you need to have a presence on chrome which grew arms and the only area that google really suffers from is in telephones but nevertheless you load a google app on your telephone which of course we all do because we all like to use g. Mail or watch you tube there on the phone as well so this is a completely unbalanced scenario that needs to be to grow caught up as soon as possible and. Lets go back to bill in london bill you know we have the we have the situation of 18 t. When they created they the baby bells ok and they competed against each other and they were actually at one point allowed to merge ok after they had been broken up and i want to speak to an issue that im sure ad will bring up but im going to mention it now the current owners of this lets say facebook and google they would have shares in these broken up companies i mean if you look at rockefeller when standard oil was broken up he became even more rich because he had shares in all of these companies that were competing against each other and creating the best product for the best price for the consumer that is a possible way bill go ahead im not sure that were going to be doing any of these actions for the benefits of they made just shareholders in some of these companies the main consideration is going to be what does this mean for the consumer and the competition in the markets and that has to be the main consideration that we focus on we need to remember that there have been a number of already inquiries both in the e. U. Out in the us into their practices by some of these companies and also into the. Sort of level of competition and these companies have become very effective in terms of their ability to lobby for their own causes and in order to frustrate some of the actions that might have been taken against them so far theyve survived with nothing more than the old find here all there and we need to understand exactly what the purpose of any action on the antitrust front is of this purpose in this moment in time and how far were going to take it im not sure that there is. All of the great rushing of fists and gnashing of teeth that the amount of power that they have and the actions theyve taken of the council. Im not sure theres actually a concerted and really well identified set of actions that we want to take against these companies at this moment insulin ok you know but you had you know just. When it was really leaked by the wall street journal i suppose it was intentionally that google was going to be investigated for antitrust its shares dropped 6 percent and theyre scared of this big time ok though they have they bankroll a lot of people in washington you know they really they stuff a lot of pockets there but there is a growing concern i wouldnt say bipartisan because theres no such thing as bipartisanship in the u. S. Right now but i voice is on both sides are beginning to say that we need to take a look into this for all the reasons that you gentlemen have already mentioned go ahead and write i mean i think all of us agree the privacy issue is the big deal here you know for good about the political leanings but the privacy issue but you know jeff is saying we need to break it up because of the privacy issue i think has been really short sighted jeff because they have they do so many other things just look at all the other companies and different you know products that they sell google specifically look at all the things that google does theyre not number one in everything theyre competing theyre winning theyre developing better products and everybody else needs to get on board and start competing against them and peter i didnt say that we wanted to you know bankroll of the companies we just need competition just like the gold state warriors right now theyre the best team in the league. We have to break them up because theyre winning so well of course not and i dont think its a very good start harris and its not a heres a good example peter go ahead i just want to make this point Amazon Amazon is doing a great job but guess what walmart is now coming on board costco is coming on board and theyre going to compete thats what we want competition gets us a better product at lower prices ok well let me go to jeff and see back here but you know when you look at companies the size of facebook and google the cost of entry is extremely high now if you were to break up these Companies Like into search and email and other products that they have so much control over that would create an enormous amount of competition and what you know was innovation is well Innovation Companies of this size do not they stop innovating ok they prefer the profits and not innovation thats bad for consumers go ahead jeff. Yeah the other error besides privacy is google controls search so and search is really the biggest the Biggest Issue here and so if you are a competing company and hoping that your win when somebody is looking for a widget that you are the going to be on the 1st pages its impossible you cant you dont google doesnt share the secret of their algorithm theres a huge scale market out there or Search Engine optimization to try to get companies on to the 1st age or opt into the top. And theres no way to do that because google doesnt share that information and because google wants to have its own information at the time for example travel so google is getting into the travel business and when any time you do a search its going to give you google will put right at the top its own travel findings for best results cheapest fares something that you know many of these troubled companies are trying to do exactly pete lets just go to safeway so go ahead and gentlemen just like when i go to safeway im going to get a safeway razor. Ok by the way im going to show where theyre going to you know and i know you so hang on guys well you know obviously google is going to support its own products let me go to bill right now and it will punish any kind of competition that it sees as well i mean you cant have it both ways saying that your youre a search for the entire internet and then say were going to punish people who reward these people are going to go to bill on that in london yeah but let me go to already seen let me go to bill who had been saying fines leveled against google in the e. U. For competitive prices and the fact that were now looking at a full anti trust hearing is a sign that the actual regulation going regulation has failed we should be keeping our head of the game here in order to stay on top of these companies to ensure that theyre not deploying anti competitive tactics if we going down the line of an antitrust suit it means that a lot of the preventive regulation has failed made in Better Regulation in results is for some of the regulators so that we can head off some of these problems ahead of the game rather than waiting in tell a company has acquired that much power and that much reach that we need to start thinking about antitrust measures and even if we are going to go down the antitrust route this isnt a simplistic exercise i mean weve seen that the Microsoft One was overturned on appeal and cold and therefore its not straightforward and even though the ones that were taken across the industry in the pulse and the baby bells these 2 years to take a few years i mean the yeah they can tell you take a decade ok jeffrey and you see you want to jump in go ahead jeff you know its not a fair comparison to say that say we will sell its own brand of razor because were not talking about when it comes to the internet it would be the example would be driving street to get to the Safeway Store but along about the streets not only by safeway the error. Is owned by safe the landscape that exists in the Digital World is pretty much by google in the west thats a true danger but the only true in the us and in the google on the internet you can go to get out of bounds you have so i have no Free Internet to handle so general google you know when he wants on the internet jeffrey go ahead and you can go ahead and get it out to a guy 2032nd stand before we go to the break ed its called the its called the yahoo had it i mean theres other Search Engines out there you dont have to just go to google i mean you certainly dont have to go just google what i think its a perfectly pairs and you drive down the road you see a Safeway Grocery store you go inside you go to get a razor instead of getting them to let their shopping safeway razors down your throat the terrible and. You know what i mean yeah theyre trying to get you to buy. Google its not just the leaders in search theyre also the leaders in so many other areas from email to advertising and a whole lot of different areas do we need a singer economy down to jump in here how this goes to a hard break and after that break well continue our discussion on big tech stayed with r. T. Join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and ill be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business im show business ill see that. Nobody could see coming that false confessions would be that prevalent in the small place before the conviction if you look at any interrogations out there what youll see is threat promise threat promise threat lie a lie a lie the process of interrogation is designed to put people in just that frame of mind make them. Uncomfortable make them want to get out and dont take no for an answer dont accept their denials she said theyre forward. So i stay here i will be calm about it the next day theres a culture on accountability that Police Officers know that they can engage in misconduct that has nothing to do with all the crime. Welcome back to cross talk where all things are considered im peter bell to remind you were discussing big tech. Ok i want to go back to bill in london you know i usually dont cite democrats like Elizabeth Warren but i will this program here a liberal democrat is that shes proposed a bill that would limit the ability of acquisitions by some of these really huge Companies Like its a huge billions billions and billions i dont remember the number exactly but i mean basically saying that you know theyre big enough not to and then they should be crowding out the field and should allow more competition and more people to enter the marketplace is that one way and set of breaking up these Companies Bill is to limit their ability to for huge acquisitions. I think we need to look at all of their acquisitions not just the huge ones i think we need to have a really healthy market of startups possibly potential future challenges in the market if these companies are able to buy up all the potential competitors which they do a trade use of that what which way were doing that that is a bad thing and people are already saying that they facebooks acquisition of whats up was questionable and id many people in hindsight think it was a bad move we want to prevent that type of acquisition in the future and we want to limit the amount to which these Large Companies can actually influence the competitive market by actually hoovering up smaller potential competitors ok and i know you disagree go ahead. I completely disagree i mean look im all about competition but if a Company Becomes so big and so good we were going to punish them for that no make others better help others help and that just seo help them but cant you see right i cant. See how you can square the circle these are theyre inherently anticompetitive when they get to this size and mass ok there and they go to an authentic will to competition i dont see how you can see that in the market completely market by providing a better serve lysine and we would encourage companies who are provide a Better Service and when they try to do that but do not buy whats up in order to take out a competitor in the market and in order to reduce the level of options to people that is not what were looking for well im very happy for facebook to create innovations of their own but not to take out competitors and to narrow the market in order to gain a broader. Control of the market ok all right i had to change gears here i mean at the same time i had go ahead go ahead. Go ahead i just just live in our in our country we want Less GovernmentLess Government allows freedom flexibility and the more government you bring in the worse its going to be for us here ok well im a inspirit i agree with you but the government should serve the people here bill lee maybe just turn them into Public Utilities thats been you know bandied about for the last few years here i mean i im kind of split on that because if its going to be a public utility then whos going to be running the public utility and itll get to the point of censorship that i want to mention after this point here so public utility bill. Public utilities i dont always find for their innovation and therefore im going to be supportive of moving in that particular direction but of course if were going to levy large fines for areas where they have either breached previously laura what theyve been anti competitive we need to channel some of the fines back into the regulators so that we can have effective regulations of well resourced regulator to ensure that there is not market abuse im all for innovation but it will sell it into a market abuse companies that are using that position in the market to stifle competition or to alter the Playing Field in their favor the it isnt the type of innovation or competition that we want to see a reply to that. I mean i agree with just about everything you just said i mean i i do love competition i do understand how big they are i just dont want the government in Elizabeth Warren dictating how things are going to run in a free market. The issue of. Censorship by these companies i mean that there is no doubt that these Large Companies are very liberal in their politics and we have been able to see behind the curtain when it came to the 2016 election the kind of the thumb that they were putting on the scale or attempting to do that and i resent that bill as a conservative in public life i really resent the a little with my Facebook Page i have a channel on on you tube they fiddle with that is well and i never told why they just intervene and do it never an explanation they deem monetise things without an explanation here i dont think that what theyre doing is theyre pushing their values on the users ok thats and i didnt sign up for that and theyll and they never told me they were going to do that so i resent that and i think its a by election of freedom of speech at least as an as an american the 1st amendment go ahead bill. I think we what we need to see here is a level of transparency and openness and the rights of the pale and some of the actions they take there is something called shadow banning which is a tactic that they employed in order to reduce the impact on the visibility of certain players in the markets now this is being used against both people on the left and on the right and people of any kind of extreme opinion but unfortunately at this moment in time some of the social Media Companies dont even have that they shadow of though it is well. Seen and understood and on top of that they act as judge jury and executioner and if the process for shadow banning and other such tactics was more open if there was an appeals process if you knew exactly what the rules were that you had to abide by and they were far more open about this then i think there would be less issues with people either on the right or on the left or of any type of opinion who feel frustrated by the level of power the social Media Companies have at this moment in time as judge jury and executioner behind the sets of a bleak and possibly misunderstood or totally ill paper rules they themselves given their senate all done in a secret court and said were ok you dont know whats going on youre never youre never given an explanation here and i mean i delve into this issue here because. Im convinced you know i want to work for more against people on the conservative side than on the liberal side when i see all of this hate speech and im not a particularly big fan of donald trump ok not at all but they hate speech projected against him and then no one touches them on twitter ok i mean its so one sided its so we have to critical if you can you should apply it across the board to everyone they should tell us what quote unquote the rules are because they dont go ahead and. I mean ill give you a great example that i go to my g. M. A. Well and i look at junk ok ill go there to see what was listed as junk according to g. Mail and it is the blaze it is the daily caller at fox news yet breitbart they have decided that that was all junk and they didnt make it into my inbox even though i signed up for these different newsletters and so on anything that is conservative that is obviously conservative g. Mail puts it in junk and i encourage everybody who has a g. Mail account just go and look and see exactly what is being thrown in there youd be blown away at what theyre what theyre doing. You know and if you were to give advice on how to deal with these Big Companies on all of the issues that we have mentioned on this program what would be the 1st thing you would suggest go ahead. I mean that was that a girl wants to build and i think i said the line i think we need we need troubles and we need to understand what the process is behind any kind of bans any kind of sanctions they take we need an appeals process we need a level of transparency in the process from end to end this moment in time it simply isnt transparent and there are people on the left or on the right you may argue that their own being unfairly treated but the thing is we dont know how theyre being treated and the act of shadow boxing or other different tactics they use they dont even admit that theyre doing the level loan provide you with an appeals process that you can actually take your case forward and ill give the case against them we need fall more transparent operation of any kind of tactic of this current by any of the social media phones you know and youve said on this program just a few minutes ago that you dont like government getting involved in the affairs of individuals lives in and i understand where youre coming from very well but what is replacing government and even more powerful than government are these companies they are the ones that are shaping values their marketing values are saying what is good what is bad and i find it very offensive and very good all the time by their choice of values saying that were the way i should live in the way i should think and if i dont think the way they do that i cant use these services or all be shadow band as its been mentioned here on this program here i mean what business do they have forming values for a society theyre just businesses theyre supposed to be intermediaries for the rest of us to do what we want to do in life go ahead. Peter im living that you know in many different places in my life and you know what they write theyre all basically writing the same stuff theres about 95 percent of the media is going to write the same stuff and dont think for a moment Facebook Twitter and google to some degree or publishers they you know when they put their thumb on the scale they become publishers theyre not unbiased platform and when they do that theyre. Actually influencing or trying to influence what we think and who are these people you know that this could be 2327 year old kids who never knew anything other than liberal economics well they were understand how the world works in some cases so i dont want them forming those because i have my kids who are very influential influenced by you know what media they go to constantly cosily sign them up for conservative newsletters and they keep canceling them and im like you know guys you gotta listen of the stuff youve got to read the you know the right information you cant just sit there and listen to the morning brew and hope thats going to be your new source. Bill you know facebook is outsourced a lot of its privacy issues and fake news issues to the Atlantic Council and the Atlantic Council is a very prowar it is the spokes group for nato and you know it seems to me that facebook is this absolving of itself of any kind of responsibility its actually given it out to a very biased Political Organisation so they can keep their hands clean saying well we didnt have anything to do with it but theyve got outsourced it to an intensely partisan group of people again which i feel in my personal life using social media go ahead bill i think theres perceived bias in almost every aspect of the way that anything is regulated and i dont think that the way that facebook or any of the other social Media Channels have tried to do it themselves or have outsourced any of this is ever going to be perfect and i dont think the governments are going to be perfect themselves i think there was a real irony here in the u. K. When the government issued on the on line holmes paper talking about how it would sanction people for publishing material content that was perceived as being harmful and the very same week that was a u. K. Citizen who went to the middle east and was arrested for an incident where she made a fairly innocuous comment about one of her axis partners. Bright. Being arrested for what in the middle east was. A home full and insightful comment that i dont think i have again to see any sort of unified opinion but well i agree i dont want to run out of time here but i dont think it should be Tech Companies telling us what our value should be thats all the time we have gentlemen many thanks to my guests in london dallas and in seabeck and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r t see you next time and remember girls. You know world is big part of movies. And conspiracy its time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that Mainstream Media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smart or we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other its time for Critical Thinking its time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. This is boom boss broadcasting around the world in covering the world of business and finance and their impact upon us all and in your burrito and im 50 i a washington heres what we have on deck today as a trade war as relates to only by the day some investors are looking at daybreak havens for their cash most notably president. At the analyst spends on iraq you know a bit he and i are both on hand to delve into the details. Silicon valley has found itself in the crosshairs of just about everyone from congress to consumers and in the wake of the revived intake textron to thank our correspondent thanks and Daniel Schorr you simply treating log on to help us tackle takes tumble you got to have show today she was died right in. A subtle threat to retaliate on terrorists leads our global report as mexican officials visiting washington tell us the u. S. State department theyre prepared to hit back if president follows through on his twitter terror threats mexican officials are reportedly considering terror tactics similar to chinas targeting imports that come from keep political areas of support for mr trump such as kentucky bourbon the Mexican Foreign minister marcella abroad reportedly deliver that message most directly to state Department Officials the mexican agriculture minister met with his u. S. Counterpart while the mexican economy minister met with the u. S. Commerce secretary wilbur ross mr abroad is set to meet on wednesday with the u. S. Secretary of state mike pump alle the mexican delegation has little room for maneuver or error as they try to signal that they will not be bullied while also avoiding actions that risk in