For quite some time progressive lawmakers have been gunning for Big Tech. Look no further than the 15-month investigation into Big Tech’s market power abuses by House Democrats that in October 2020 called for the companies to be reined in. But now pressure is also coming from the right—although for different reasons. That intensified following Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump and Apple and Amazon’s move to block Parler, a social media app that became popular among Trump supporters (Apple says Parler “failed to rein in hate-filled, violent speech”).
Just how big is this movement against Big Tech? To find out, Fortune and SurveyMonkey polled 2,554 U.S. between January 11 and 12.* We compared the results to a similar poll we conducted in June 2020.
We found Americans are falling out of love with Big Tech—and fast.
67%
- … of U.S. adults say they’re worried about consolidation among tech firms. That’s up 26 percentage points from our June 2020 poll when 41% of U.S. adults held that opinion.
64%
- … of U.S. adults would like to see the federal government investigate at least one Big Tech firm for antitrust violations.
48%
- … of U.S. adults would like to see the federal government break up at least one Big Tech firm.
Google, Facebook, and Apple saw the biggest upticks in Americans calling for them to be broken up, jumping up 8 percentage points from Fortune‘s earlier poll this summer. But no tech firm was spared: The smallest uptick was Amazon at 6 percentage points. (We couldn’t calculate a change for Twitter, since it was not part of our June poll.) The company Americans most want broken up remains Facebook at 35%. The Menlo Park, Calif. social media giant is followed by Twitter (30%), Amazon (27%), Google (24%), Apple (22%), and Microsoft (19%).
Largely, this move against Big Tech is driven by rank-and-file Republicans. While 56% of Democrats would like to see the federal government investigate at least one Big Tech firm for antitrust violations, that number soars to 76% among Republicans. And 65% Republicans want at least one Big Tech firm broken up, compared to 40% of Democrats.
The mounting animosity on the right is most targeted at social media companies: The two Big Tech companies Republicans most want to see investigated are Facebook (67%) and Twitter (64%), followed by Google (52%) and Apple (49%). Among Democrats, they’re most interested in the Feds investigating Facebook (44%) and Amazon (33%), followed by Twitter (29%), and Google (28%).
Our poll was conducted between Jan. 11 to 12, or just days after tech companies like Facebook and Twitter banned Trump from their platforms. Those bans might explain some of this backlash against tech among Republicans. After all, the Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll finds 83% of Republicans oppose Twitter’s decision to ban Trump.
While the Grand Old Party has the lowest public opinion of Big Tech, if a break-up does comes it’ll likely be driven by Democrats. In past decades both parties have embraced Robert Bork’s laissez-faire antitrust approach to only go after businesses that use their monopoly power to hurt consumers (aka price gouging). That school of thought has protected Big Tech, which for the most part isn’t hosing us with high prices—in fact, many of their services are free. But President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is expected to become more aggressive in its approached to antitrust: Instead of focusing on price gouging, the Biden DOJ could center its cases against Big Tech centers on the grounds of anti-competitive practices against their competitors and other businesses.
If a monopoly crackdown does come, Big Tech won’t have the U.S. public in its corner.
*Methodology: The Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll was conducted among a national sample of 2,554 adults in the U.S. between January 11 and 12. This survey’s modeled error estimate is plus or minus 3 percentage points. The findings have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography.
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