Amazon’s decision to ban books questioning transgender ideology is a foot in the door. The next steps that we’re already familiar with will escalate to widespread bans on conservative books that challenge the leftist view on any area of identity politics. 

That was always going to happen. It was only a matter of when it would happen.

In the past, libertarians would have argued that a company wouldn’t alienate much of its customer base. And that if it did, the customers would go elsewhere. Those ideas were always wrong, but in the wake of coordinated Big Tech censorship, like the kind that took down Parler, it’s just silly.

Amazon controls over half the print book market and far more of the ebook market. It’s constantly expanding and no company seems likely to be able to challenge its dominance.

It’s the same story for Google in search and for its Android platform and Apple counterpart, which together with Amazon, shut down Parler.

Amazon has nothing to worry about from its customers and there are few alternatives anyway. Any companies with a similar scale, e.g. eBay, are even more aggressive about banning books. It was eBay that announced that it would purge Dr. Seuss listings. And the alternatives are largely meaningless.

If a publisher understands that a particular book topic will be banned on Amazon, then much of its business goes out the window making it less likely that it will pick up the book, pay the writer a livable advance, and all the other basics.

Finally, Amazon can announce that it will refuse to list any books from a publisher that flouts its moral code. And then it’s over except for the Samizdat. 

6 companies have a death grip on the marketplace of ideas. That’s the reality. The question is where do we go from there?

I’ve spent the worst part of the last decade warning that if we don’t break up the giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google, they will break us. We’re now closer to that red line than ever as Big Tech colluded to take down an administration that had been actively seeking to break it up.

Let’s begin with 3 points.

1. A free society requires a free means of communication. Not ‘free’ as in free of charge, but free of censorship. Whether a government or a cartel that is integrated with the government does the censoring doesn’t really matter. What matters is the outcome. 

The ideological rigidity that prevented too many conservatives from grasping that is falling away.

2. The only free internet is a decentralized internet. The internet was meant to be decentralized. It’s only as free as it is decentralized. Turning the internet into a handful of railroads controlled by the new railroad barons left us even less free than we were before the internet.

Getting conservatives there is a slower process. But a needed one. Section 230 will not open up the internet. Breaking up some of the big boys is a start. But it’s not the ultimate solution in an industry that has gone relentlessly woke. 

3. If conservatives want to be a counterculture, that means finding ways to disrupt established monopolies and open up closed systems. We are not the ones in power. We’re the resistance and we need to start thinking and acting like it. We’re dealing with closed systems. Systems are opened up by disrupting them, by innovating, and by challenging their limits. All of this is part of the process. An oligarchy dominating the internet would inevitably turn repressive and suppress ideas that its leaders disagreed with. This is the impetus for breaking that system and opening up the internet again.