That's my take, and just my opinion.
Congress has lagged in oversight of these big tech companies. And now it wants to make its work even harder, by claiming it wants to regulate a whole bunch more tech companies. I don't think something that approaches an important national utility status needs to be broken up just yet. As usual, I take the techies' side. Because they're right about why the Internet's getting beaten up right now.
Culture war: These are always popular during election seasons. Politicians need to get people riled up while pretending that they're "doing something." So starting culture wars is a common past time during election seasons.
Distraction: We're still in the middle of a pandemic in which thousands of people are dying. We're still in the middle of an economic crisis with record unemployment, and massive impacts to people all around the country. We're still in the middle of a social upheaval as more and more people are speaking out against police brutality. We're still in the middle of huge climate issues, including devastating wild fires up and down the west coast and devastating hurricanes in the south. Fighting with internet dweebs is a distraction.
Fundraising: It's common knowledge in DC for politicians that if you need to bump up your coffers, you introduce important legislation about an industry that is doing well, because it leads them to suddenly start throwing money into the campaign funds of folks on all sides of the issue. Tech is an industry that has been doing well, so why the fuck not?
Working the refs: A key strategy of Republicans lately has been to try to use this "oh, poor us, we're the victims" snowflake mentality to pressure social media companies to treat them with kid gloves when it comes to handling the propaganda and misinformation they're posting on social media. Continually attacking tech companies has worked so far, in at least getting Facebook to give Trump and friends more leeway to post nonsense, so why not keep pushing that button over and over again.
...at a time when technology and the internet has become that much more important due to the pandemic that the President seems to want to ignore, it seems that much more damaging to focus on destroying and hammering the open internet. It's positively backwards.
Sure, let's attack the one sector that is helping to keep a bunch of stuff afloat, and helping to keep people at home, rather sending them out to risk their lives in the midst of a pandemic.
And, of course, all of this seems to be coming directly at the request of the President himself who is desperately looking for any issue to draw focus to other than all of the things that make him look bad:
“There’s hardly a conversation I have with the president where this doesn’t come up, where Section 230 does not come up, usually raised by him,” Hawley said in an interview...
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/covid/
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