Enlarge / Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Jan. 21, 2021. (credit: Stefani Reynolds - pool | Getty Images )

With a new session of Congress underway and a new administration in the White House, Big Tech is once again in lawmakers' crosshairs. Not only are major firms such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law, but a newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place.

The bill ( PDF ), called the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA for short, which is still awkward) would become the largest overhaul to US antitrust regulation in at least 45 years if it became law.

"While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) when she introduced the bill on Thursday. "We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate," Klobuchar added, calling the bill "the first step to overhauling and modernizing our laws" to protect competition in the current era.

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, two of the FCC's three Republicans, talk before the start of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on August 16, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Clark )

The Republican-controlled US Senate today confirmed a Trump nominee to the Federal Communications Commission, ensuring that President-elect Joe Biden's FCC will be deadlocked at 2-2 upon his inauguration.

The Senate voted along party lines to confirm Nathan Simington, a Trump administration official who helped draft a petition asking the FCC to make it easier to sue social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Democrats say he is unqualified for the position.

"During his confirmation hearing even the most basic questions about FCC issues seemed to trip up Nathan Simington. It's clear he is wholly unqualified to help lead this agency," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter today .

Enlarge / Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price was a member of the AAPS, an organization with extreme, unscientific views who keeps being asked to give testimony to Congress. (credit: Zach Gibson / Getty Images )

On Tuesday, the US Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will host a hearing on treatments for COVID-19. The four witnesses all have MDs, and three of them work at hospitals, suggesting that this is a case where the Senate will be receiving information from people with relevant expertise. It's the fourth witness, however, that suggests some of the testimony may go completely off the rails and raises further doubts that US politicians are taking a raging pandemic seriously.

Jane Orient has an MD and is the head of a serious-sounding organization called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). But a quick look at the group's history shows that it has adopted positions—such as promoting chloroquine and opposing government vaccination programs—that make it a questionable source of COVID-19 information. And the AAPS actually has a long history of adopting extreme and fringe positions that run contrary to all evidence, in part because of its opposition to government involvement in anything. But because of these libertarian tendencies, the group has maintained a close relationship with conservative politicians.

Bad pandemic advice

It doesn't take much searching to determine that the AAPS has fringe views about the pandemic. In late April, evidence was developing that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, wasn't effective against COVID-19 , leading the FDA to scale back its emergency approval. Four days after that decision, the AAPS sent out a press release claiming that the drug "has about 90 percent chance of helping COVID-19 patients." That claim was false at the time—it was apparently based simply on counting any studies that saw any effect toward that 90-percent total. And subsequent studies have clearly indicated the drug is ineffective.

Enlarge / Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) at a Senate hearing on The State of Broadband Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, on Wednesday, May 13, 2020. (credit: Bill Clark | CQ Roll Call | Getty Images )

The decimation of local media is by now a sad, familiar tale experienced by tens of millions of Americans all over the country. In a report released today, the Senate Commerce Committee's top Democrat is laying blame for the bloodbath squarely at the feet of Google and Facebook, claiming the companies have participated in destroying local news in the pursuit of monopolizing monetization.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) released the scathing new report ( PDF ) today, ahead of a scheduled hearing Wednesday in which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying.

It is true that the advertising streams that funded local newspapers before the advent of the Internet changed dramatically in the 21st century as news went digital. Even so, the report says, outlets could have been able to manage except that "Local news has been hijacked by a few large news aggregation platforms, most notably Google and Facebook, which have become the dominant players in online advertising."

Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Two senior senators—Republican Rob Portman of Ohio and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois—are introducing legislation to allow Senate votes to be held remotely.

"In times of extraordinary national crisis, the Senate must be able to convene and act expeditiously even if we can't be together in person," Portman said in a press statement.

Some members in the House of Representatives have also been pushing to allow remote voting in the House. A bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Wednesday urging her to allow remote voting.