If you were going to give The Three Stooges a modern-day Silicon Valley treatment, you couldn’t write a better opening scene than the one that played out last Monday in Washington D.C., when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stand in the most significant tech-antitrust trial in 15 years, and accused Alphabet’s Google of having a monopoly on search-engine traffic. We’re talking classic comedy here, people — Laurel and Hardy antitrust antics, Lucy and Ethel fighting in a data-stomping vat, a Benny Hill Goes to Washington episode lacking only the “Yackety Sax” soundtrack.
Are we in a seemingly inescapable government-surveillance dystopia, eagerly enabled by the unchecked data-mining and Congressional lobbying dollars of corporate jötunn like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and OpenAI? Sure. Is it likely that Google will appeal any pro-regulatory outcome of the antitrust case, while both it and Microsoft continue simping for the Pentagon’s domestic spying operations? Very. But will that stop us from laughing like hyenas at our tech-emperors’ new clothes whenever we see their bare bottoms jiggling through the halls of justice, just begging for a slap? Not on my watch.
