October 26, 2020

Big Tech Monopolies

The largest tech companies are taking incoming fire from both sides of the aisle. The most common complaints from conservatives is that Big Tech has an anti-conservative bias, while progressives believe that Big Tech violates antitrust laws. Tech CEOs have been invited to testify before congress on various topics and two weeks after the election Twitter CEO Dorsey and Facebook CEO Zuckerberg will be sitting in the hot seat again.

ActiVote conducted a survey in the ActiVote app to determine what our users thought about Tech Giants and whether any action is needed and if so what. We provided five options to choose from, which can be summarized as follows:

Big tech companies should be broken up, like the trusts of the early 20th century.
Big tech companies should only be broken up if found in violation of antitrust law.
Big tech companies should be investigated and required to ensure higher privacy and consumer protection standards.
Big tech companies should be left unregulated, but should be more transparent with their users over privacy and ethics standards.
Big tech companies should be left unregulated.

The headline result

break them up

30%

break up, if violating anti-trust

32%

investigate and higher consumer protections

26%

more transparent

leave unregulated

See the details below →

A large majority of 89% would like to see some action and a majority of 62% would consider breaking them up, where half of these believe that we should just go ahead while the other half wants to see if they have violated antitrust laws first.

The crosstabs

Dem

30%

32%

35%

Rep

31%

26%

13%

Ind

26%

42%

22%

11%

break them upbreak up, if violating anti-trustinvestigate and higher consumer protectionsmore transparentleave unregulated

See the details below →

There are few issues where there is such a limited partisan divide: although 96% of Democrats like to see action and “only” 83% of Republicans, there are very clear majorities independent of party affiliation for taking action.

Overall, Big Tech should brace themselves for actions from the Federal Government, seemingly independent of who will be in charge in DC for the coming few years.

	552 RV	break them up	break up, if violating anti-trust	investigate and higher consumer protections	more transparent	leave unregulated
National	±4.2% MoE	30%	32%	26%	8%	3%
Gender	Men	30%	33%	24%	9%	4%
Gender	Women	30%	31%	30%	7%	2%
Age	18-29	25%	35%	25%	11%	4%
	30-49	33%	28%	29%	4%	6%
	50-64	26%	35%	23%	15%	1%
	65+	40%	32%	28%	0%	0%
Ethnicity	White	34%	27%	31%	6%	2%
	Black	41%	32%	17%	10%	0%
	Latino	30%	34%	22%	8%	6%
Education	High school	42%	22%	27%	3%	5%
	Some college	23%	32%	31%	12%	3%
	Bachelor's	27%	42%	20%	9%	2%
Income	<50k	36%	25%	28%	7%	5%
	50k-100k	36%	25%	25%	10%	3%
	>100k	15%	50%	27%	7%	1%
Affiliation	Dem	30%	32%	35%	4%	0%
	Rep	31%	26%	26%	13%	6%
	Ind	26%	42%	22%	11%	0%
Region	Dark Red	19%	32%	33%	12%	4%
	Light Red	41%	28%	23%	3%	5%
	Swing	30%	43%	14%	11%	2%
	Light Blue	39%	26%	27%	8%	0%
	Dark Blue	22%	29%	36%	8%	5%

Big Tech Monopolies

The Details

The full crosstab table