Background

Google is once again in the crosshairs of Republicans in Congress because of alleged censorship. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Google's parent company Alphabet and CEO Sundar Pichai for evidence of communication between the tech company and the Biden administration.

The subpoena specifically asks for documents covering communications between Alphabet and the executive branch, along with discussions Alphabet might have had internally or with third-parties about those communications. The Committee hopes to snowball the discovery that the Biden administration made requests to Meta to remove COVID-19 misinformation into a case for "new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users," the subpoena says.

Past Concerns

None of these concerns are particularly new. Pichai and other tech CEOs have been brought in front of Congress to explain things like content moderation, censorship and bias before. In the past, it's mostly seemed like a way for members of Congress to get sound bites, but the aggressive, retaliatory nature of the Trump administration might give these new demands more teeth.

Helping to pay for Trump's inauguration and showing up for photos didn't get Google protection in the end, assuming it doesn't manage to wriggle out of the ongoing antitrust case against it. Tech companies might be getting attention from Congress, but the idea that the current administration might want to make censorship demands doesn't appear to be a concern.

Take It Down Act

President Trump has expressed interest in using the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to hold websites liable for hosting and not removing Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), to eliminate any kind of speech he dislikes. The disastrous potential misuses of the law have been outlined by activists before, but the bill passed in the Senate and is now waiting to be taken up by the House.

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