Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox News Channel’s highly-rated Tucker Carlson Tonight, had some rather interesting things to say on Monday about social media giant Google.

While never entirely out of the news in these days, Google has been a topic of heightened interest lately because of the recent dustup concerning employee – now former employee – James Damore. As you likely heard, Damore, a software engineer, decided to publish a memo in which he partly made the case that there’s a dearth of women in the technology field because, as a gender, females tend to reflect traits that make them inherently less likely to be as successful as men in certain areas, like technology.

Shortly thereafter, Damore was fired from Google for violating its code of conduct and promoting negative gender stereotypes.

Well, Carlson has a compelling take on Google in light of the furor. He thinks that the size and scope of Google…namely, that it essentially controls the flow of not just America’s, but the world’s, information…means it should be regulated by the government in the way a public utility is regulated.

Carlson, making his case, said, “Google is the most powerful company in the history of the world. It’s the portal through which the bulk of our information flows. That means that if Google isn’t on the level, neither is our understanding of the world. To an unprecedented extend, Google controls reality.

Now Google has already shown a disturbing willingness to distort reality for ideological ends.”
Carlson later added, “Why should a company that shuts down free speech for political reasons have the power to dictate what the world knows and thinks? Well, of course it shouldn’t have that power. Google’s long time motto was, don’t be evil. Today it uses do the right thing. We should have seen this coming. Those are super villain slogans if there was ever such a thing. None of this can continue.

“In Europe, Google has already been hit with a nearly $3 billion fine for violating antitrust law. Congress here and the Trump administration should go further than that. Since it has the power to censor the internet, Google should be regulated like the public utility it is to make sure it doesn’t further distort the free flow of information.”

Hmmm…

by Robert G. Yetman, Jr.