“It started with tuna,” explains Congressman Ken Buck, when asked why he doesn’t use Google.
Buck, 62, is a four-term Republican who represents the ranching country of eastern Colorado, and he was recalling a time 30-odd years ago when he learned that dolphins were being killed in Japanese tuna fisheries’ drift nets. It stuck in his brain, he says, until one day he was getting a bite to eat at the deli. On the spot, he decided: Unless it was the more sustainable albacore variety, no more tuna for him. That day he got the chicken salad instead.
What followed was a series of personal boycotts: He opted to drive a Ford after GM and Chrysler took federal bailout money; he cut the Nike logo out of his favorite shorts over Colin Kaepernick.
“When I see something that I consider an injustice, 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 close; he dipped into his oatmeal breakfast from the House carryout, a “Make America Great Again” hat on the shelf behind him.
For the past nearly two years, Buck has been staging, or trying to stage, a one-person Capitol Hill boycott of a set of companies most of Washington would find it nearly impossible to give up: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those corporations, he argues, use their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse users’ privacy for profit, indulge the Chinese government with impunity and censor conservatives. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of those things.)
Buck has called on his Republican colleagues to swear off taking campaign contributions from those companies. But Buck is personally taking things a bit further. He doesn’t search the web with Google, he says. He directs his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn’t use Facebook, even to communicate with family. “If they want to talk to me, they call,” he says. It is, says Buck, a “conscience thing.”
Where that all changes from “quirky member of Congress” to meaningful is that Buck also happens to be one of the people in Washington most responsible for overseeing Silicon Valley.
Ten months ago, Buck took over the Republican Party’s highest-ranking spot 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 he’d dug into that work, he had, he says, grown appalled. He came to believe that Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook bullied competitors, tracked their users and generally abused their considerable power over the lives of Americans. “As a prosecutor, it was really offensive to me. Those are criminal offenses,” he says. “Those are people that belong behind bars.”
(The companies, of course, reject the idea that their executives belong behind bars.)
Joe Biden’s Washington is right now grappling with what to do about the American tech industry, and this summer Buck’s own subcommittee approved a sweeping set of bipartisan bills aimed at reining in the big four, as they’re known. (Twitter, a much smaller company than the others, largely escapes antitrust scrutiny.) Buck is optimistic that at least some of them will become law, but in the meantime, he’s waging what he calls “my little personal protest.”
Liberals don’t have a monopoly on mindful consumption, he says. He intertwines his fingers. “AOC and Ken Buck, just like that,” he says, and laughs.
What does it actually look like for a member of Congress to swear off some of modern life’s most popular, most ubiquitous technology?
His policy can make things awkward. In mid-September, Buck was a featured speaker at a nearly day-long POLITICO virtual event on the relationship between Washington and the American tech industry. But the session was hosted on a platform optimized for Google’s Chrome browser, which Buck had sworn off. For 18 long minutes, jaunty hold music looped as his staff worked to get him logged in.
Says Buck: If his staff had told him in advance “and said, ‘Well this is going to use Google, I would have, you know, [said] ‘red flag.’”
On a recent Tuesday, Buck let a reporter follow along as he attempted to navigate day-to-day life on Capitol Hill without the benefit of big tech’s tools.
“I don’t mean any offense to the congressman, but I’m not sure I believe him,” says Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, when presented with the idea that Buck avoids Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.
Gillmor, like Buck, worries about the control tech tools give corporations over people’s daily lives. He doesn’t use most social networks, either, but says he’s struggled with giving up the big four up completely: “You can’t be pure and still be engaged in the modern world.”
People who abstain completely from social media and other big-tech products are sometimes called ‘digital vegans.’ Buck, by necessity, turns out to be more of a digital flexitarian. Shortly after lunch he has a meeting with a fellow Republican member in the neighboring Longworth Building. Making his way down the marble hallways, he pulls out his phone, clad in an American flag case. It’s how, he says, he knows where he needs to be and what he needs to be doing.
It is, also, an iPhone. As in, an Apple iPhone. Buck gets it. The House’s IT unit gives offices the option of two types of officially sanctioned 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 Silicon Valley’s giants. (Buck is hardly alone in his decision: According to House Information Resources, of the more than 10,000 mobile devices in the House, about 99 percent are iPhones.)
Buck opens his color-coded calendar on his iPhone. If this were the late 1990s, Buck might be in trouble: It’s Microsoft Outlook, and back then, Microsoft was Washington’s poster child for bad tech-industry behavior. The Justice Department settled its antitrust case with the company in 2001, and today Buck sees Microsoft as less a part of the oligarchy than 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,” says Buck. “I have a problem with monopolies and how they use their monopoly power.”
“If he swore off Microsoft, he’d be screwed,” says Bradford Fitch, president of the non-partisan Congressional Management Foundation. That’s because Microsoft is baked into the House’s operations — it’s the default for everything from email to calendaring to web conferencing.
Buck says his choices require some sacrifices, but ones he’s perfectly happy to make. For web searches, he avoids Google in favor of DuckDuckGo, the self-described privacy-respecting Google alternative that has about 3 percent of the market share in search. “If I wait an extra 10 seconds to get a search result or I have to scan a couple extra pages to get the information I want, I still survive,” he says. “It’s amazing to me. I say to people, ‘Do you know what Amazon does?’ ‘Yeah, but I get next-day delivery.’ Oh, that justifies everything.” He rolls his eyes.
As we shuffle into an elevator, Buck says he used Waze for mapping until he realized that it had been bought by Google. Same goes for his attempt to buy American technology. His laptop is a Lenovo Yoga; he was excited about that company’s affiliation with IBM until he visited a Big Blue facility. “They said, ‘Oh, we sold that company — to the Chinese!,’” says Buck.
Instead of ordering from Amazon, he says, he shops on places like the artisanal online marketplace Etsy or Walmart.com.
Wait, Walmart?
“I don’t know that any corporation is clean, so what I have to do is decide who is more offensive to me than others, and be realistic about it,” says Buck. “You know, I wish that Walmart didn’t buy all their products from Vietnam and India and Bangladesh and China,” but here he applies a competition test: “When you look at e-commerce, Walmart’s a small player compared to Amazon.” (A recent tally found Walmart about one-sixth the size of Amazon when it comes to online sales.)
Buck’s abstinence is enabled by another loophole: staff.
Standing outside his meeting spot on the Longworth House Office Building’s 4th floor, I ask Buck how he gets his news. He nods his head to the left towards his deputy chief of staff: “I call Rachel and say, ‘What happened today?’”
Here Buck assumes what I’m quickly learning is his go-to tone: kidding, and also serious. With 69,000 followers, the @RepKenBuck Twitter account is active and spirited, regularly used to poke at President Biden, China and big tech. “I’ve got to use Twitter, in order to communicate,” he says. But: “I don’t tweet. Someone tweets.”
Back in his office, he hollers for another staff member; “This is my intercom system,” he says.
“When I turn on my computer, how do I do that?,” Buck asks her.
“I turn it on for you,” she says.
He reaches into his desk drawer to pull out a sticky note, affixed to his checkbook, that holds his computer password.
Even his hands-off approach leads to some slip-ups. Last summer, Buck and David Cicilline, the Democrat from Rhode Island who chairs the House antitrust subcommittee, were deep in their longrunning investigation into competition and the online platforms. “They ordered something from Amazon,” he remembers. “I’m in the middle of these antitrust hearings, and I said, ‘What is this Amazon box doing in our office?’”
When I mention to Buck that the digital system that his office uses to manage its constituent work is powered by software that runs on Amazon Web Services, its enormously popular cloud-computing platform, he throws up his hands.
Winding his way through the subterranean, polished concrete tunnels connecting the Capitol complex, Buck explains that he joined the antitrust subcommittee on the recommendation of a then top-staffer in his office — a staffer who, in June of 2020, left his office to go work for, of all places, Facebook.
How did Buck react? “I’m glad you’re making a lot of money. I hope to put you out of business.”
He catches himself: “Not really put her out of business, but I thought it was kind of ironic.”
He arrives at his meeting. It’s with Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher. Now that his subcommittee’s package of antitrust bills made it out of committee, Buck’s gone into sales mode. He’s been trying to convince his fellow Republicans — upset over what many of them say they see as Silicon Valley’s bias against the right, but wary of giving government more power over the private sector — to support a push to bring the proposals to the House floor. But Buck says it isn’t always easy given the partisan politics of the chamber.
“I like David,” says Buck of Cicilline, the antitrust subcommittee chair. “Because he’s a bomb-thrower on his side, there’s a lot of people on our side that don’t trust him. I find him to be very trustworthy. Everything he’s told me about antitrust — antitrust trust,” Buck says, enjoying the play on words — “I’ve found credible. But he was one of those people that was so over the top on Trump that it really is difficult. There are times that I say to him, can you tone it down a little to get this antitrust stuff done?”
Late in the afternoon, Buck heads to the House floor for votes. Standing in a hallway just off the House’s subway system, he reports that he used some of the time chatting with members on legislation the Judiciary Committee is considering.
“I really like talking and seeing people face to face,” says Buck.
Whether his colleagues in the House also like meeting face-to-face is, he says, somewhat generational.
“I get on the elevators with these kids, and I go out of my way to say, ‘Hi, how are you? Nice to see you.’” He pantomimes someone with their head buried in their phone. “I think we lose a little bit of that,” he says.
“I’m old-fashioned,” says Buck, his phone in his pocket as he heads off quietly down the hall.
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