The sacred right to heckle your leaders

There are good reasons to dislike Amazon, but calling out politicians isn't one of them.

I mentioned the Reddit acronym ESH - “everybody sucks here” - last week, and in my experience it rarely applies more perfectly as it does when politicians go after the tech behemoths.

I’m agnostic on the issue of whether Amazon, Facebook and other giant tech companies should be broken up on antitrust grounds. The amount of power they hold is almost incomprehensible, and they didn’t attain such power by playing nicely. I’m also skeptical that breaking them up would really accomplish that much.

As for the would-be trustbusters, I believe that politicians who grandstand about taking on big tech are doing so primarily out of self-interest. If it actually helps consumers and users, that’s gravy, but in the end it’s really about silencing critics and their opponents. (If any lefty critics of Amazon have gone after them for taking Parler offline or deciding they won’t sell politically inconvenient books anymore, I must have missed it.)

Last week, the Senior Senator from Massachusetts said …