How Apple and Google Are Censoring the Mobile Web

In the marketplace, traditionally understood, when a company produces a poor product or mistreats its customers, it faces market discipline — new ones come in and steal market share. That’s the theory, at least.

Too bad it’s not true right now, at least not on the Internet.

Google and Apple, with a combined 98 percent market share in mobile-phone operating systems, have banned Gab, an upstart Twitter competitor with a free-speech policy quaintly modeled on the First Amendment itself, from their app stores. Google cited “hate speech” as its reason for exclusion; Gab doesn’t censor.

What few people yet understand is that Google and Apple have used their duopoly status to revoke the First Amendment on mobile phones. Because the Internet is now majority mobile, and a growing majority of all Web traffic comes from mobile devices, the First Amendment is now effectively dead in the mobile sphere unless policymakers act to rein in the tech giants who serve as corporate gatekeepers to digital speech.

Read the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post