The congressman who doesn’t use Google


“When I see something that I consider unfair, I just don’t buy the product,” says Buck, sitting behind his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building. He wore a dark, lightly checked suit, his gray hair cropped; he soaked in his home-to-go oatmeal breakfast, a “Make America Great Again” hat on the shelf behind him.

Over the past two years, Buck has organized or attempted to stage a one-person boycott on Capitol Hill against a set of companies most of Washington would have almost impossible to abandon: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. and Twitter. . These companies, he says, are using their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse user privacy for profit, let the Chinese government go on with impunity, and censor the Tories. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of these things.)

Buck called on his fellow Republicans to swear not to take campaign contributions from these companies. But Buck personally takes it a step further. He doesn’t search the web with Google, he says. He orders his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn’t use Facebook, even to communicate with his family. “If they want to talk to me, they call,” he said. It is, says Buck, a “thing of conscience”.

Where it all turns from “eccentric member of Congress” to meaningful is that Buck is also one of the people in Washington most responsible for overseeing Silicon Valley.

Ten months ago, Buck took over as head of the Republican Party on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. The subcommittee was more than a year and a half into an investigation into competition in digital markets, and as it digged into this work, it had, he said, become appalled. He came to believe that Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook intimidated their competitors, stalked their users, and generally abused their considerable power over the lives of Americans. “As a prosecutor, it was really offensive to me. These are criminal offenses, ”he said. “These are people who belong behind bars.”

(Businesses, of course, reject the idea that their leaders belong behind bars.)

Joe Biden’s Washington is currently grappling with what to do about America’s tech industry, and this summer Buck’s own subcommittee approved a broad set of bipartisan bills to curb the big four, as they are called. (Twitter, a much smaller company than the rest, largely escapes antitrust scrutiny.) Buck is optimistic that at least some of these will become laws, but in the meantime he’s leading what he does. calls “my little personal protest”.

Liberals do not have a monopoly on conscious consumption, he says. He intertwines his fingers. “AOC and Ken Buck, just like that,” he laughs.

What does it really look like for a congressman to forgo some of the most popular and ubiquitous technology in modern life?

His politics can make things embarrassing. In mid-September, Buck was a guest speaker at a one-day POLITICO virtual event on Washington’s relationship with the US tech industry. But the session was hosted on a platform optimized for Google’s Chrome browser, which Buck had given up. For 18 long minutes, the music on hold looped as his team worked to get him online.

Said Buck: If his staff had told him ahead of time ‘and said,’ Well, this is going to use Google, I would have, you know, [said] ‘red flag.'”

One recent Tuesday, Buck let a reporter follow him as he attempted to navigate everyday life on Capitol Hill without the benefit of the tools of big tech.

“I don’t mean to offend the congressman, but I’m not sure I believe it, ”said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior technologist at the ACLU, when introduced to the idea of ​​Buck avoiding Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

Gillmor, like Buck, is concerned about the control technological tools give companies over people’s daily lives. He do not use most social networks, either, but says he finds it difficult to completely let go of the big four: “You cannot be pure and still be engaged in the modern world.”

People who abstain completely from social media and other high-tech products are sometimes referred to as “Digital vegans”. Buck, out of necessity, turns out to be more of a digital flexitarian. Shortly after lunch, he has a meeting with another Republican member in the nearby Longworth Building. Walking through the marble halls, he pulls out his phone, wearing a case with the American flag. This is how, he says, he knows where he needs to be and what to do.

It’s also an iPhone. As in, a Apple iPhone. Buck understands. The Home IT unit offers offices the option of two officially licensed types of phones: iPhones and Samsung phones running the Android operating system. But Android is backed by Google, so Buck had to make a choice between two of the giants of Silicon Valley. (Buck isn’t the only one making this decision: according to House Information Resources, of the more than 10,000 mobile devices in the home, about 99% are iPhones.)

Buck opens his color-coded calendar on his iPhone. If it was in the late ’90s, Buck might be in trouble: it’s Microsoft Outlook, and at the time Microsoft was Washington’s child star for the tech industry’s bad behavior. The Department of Justice settled his antitrust case with the company in 2001, and today Buck sees Microsoft less as part of the oligarchy and more as a useful alternative. Its Bing search engine competes with Google’s, and it owns LinkedIn, a challenger to Facebook.

“I don’t have a problem with big tech,” Buck says. “I have a problem with monopolies and the way they use their monopoly power. “

“If he’d sworn to give up on Microsoft, he’d be screwed,” says Bradford Fitch, chairman of the Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan organization. That’s because Microsoft is built into Home operations – it’s the default for everything from email to calendar to web conferencing.