The House Energy and Commerce committee, led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), is planning to investigate the state of the video marketplace in America, as streaming companies like Google-owned YouTube and Disney-owned Hulu make a bid for dominance in TV distribution.
The hearing comes as Adam Candeub, who led President Trump’s efforts to develop regulations against Big Tech censorship, calls for increased scrutiny of companies like Hulu and YouTube.
In this Aug. 13, 2020 file photo, the logos for Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and Sling TV are pictured on a remote control in Portland, Ore. As streaming services proliferate, it can be a challenge to keep track of where some favorite TV shows and blockbuster movies are available. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
In a recent piece in Forbes, Candeub argued that companies owned by Google and Disney are likely to be just as biased against conservatives as traditional cable and TV distributors like the ones that blacklisted One America News.
Via Forbes:
The only right of center channel aired on Hulu Live or YouTube TV is Fox News—this is despite YouTube TV hosting over a dozen news and current affairs channels including very ideologically left wing channels not on traditional cable such as The Young Turks TV.
This is in line with Google’s long established bias against conservatives. To give just a few recent examples: it recently demonetized a video by Ben Shapiro discussing tech censorship, and censored discussions by two African American academics Glenn Loury and John McWhorter—the former of whom is a well-known economist at Brown University and first tenured African American ecconomist at Harvard, and the latter is a NY Times columnist and renounce linguistic professor at Columbia University—for making pretty moderate comments about crime and wokeness.
Candeub also noted that Big Tech TV streaming platforms are currently subject to none of the oversight and regulation faced by companies like Verizon and Comcast, despite the fact that Big Tech companies are far more wealthy and powerful.
YouTubeTV—despite running the same programming, charging similar fees, having a far larger market share than many of the largest cable companies, and being a subsidiary of a trillion dollar conglomeration which monopolizes or is dominant firm user generated video, search, mobile operation services, email, and web browsing— faces none of these regulations.
Republican FCC commissioner Nathan Simington has also expressed concern that tech companies seem to face fewer regulations than their competitors.
While not calling for any specific FCC action, GOP commissioner Simington noted that Google’s increased market share in linear TV “is another example where Big Tech has more power and less regulation than their competitors in the broadcast and cable industries.”
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. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.