The Department of Justice Antitrust Division submitted a statement of interest in an antitrust case led by the Children’s Health Defense, potentially delivering a serious blow to big tech and censorship.

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Breitbart has the details of the case:

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a global partnership of 23 members featuring big tech organizations such as Meta, Google, and big media outlets such as the British Broadcasting Organization (BBC), the Associated Press (AP), the Thomson Reuters, and the Washington Post.

Together these big tech and big media organizations seek to combat “harmful disinformation in real time” that “could threaten the integrity of democracy, particularly during elections.”

…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department, founded the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), as part of a mission to end “childhood health epidemics” by “eliminating toxic exposure.” The organization has four pillars as part of its mission: litigation, education, science, and advocacy.

The Children’s Health Defense in 2023 filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative, believing that the organizations and its affiliate members colluded to censor “online news.” The case remains at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

CHD claims that TNI’s actions amount to little more than a “group boycott,” a collaboration prohibited under federal antitrust law.

Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, head of the DOJ Antitrust Department, filed a statement of interest in the lawsuit yesterday. Breitbart defines a statement of interest as “a document submitted in ongoing court cases, usually in a federal court where the Justice Department expresses its views on the legal issues at play.”

In their statement of interest, Slater and other DOJ officials wrote:

Individual liberty—and consumer welfare—benefit greatly from  viewpoint competition in news markets and can suffer when that competition is reduced. News consumers desire and demand diverse perspectives.  Americans therefore vitally depend on viewpoint competition in the marketplace of ideas to limit the abuse of market power and ensure the free flow of information in our democracy.

This statement sums up why censorship of news is so bad, even when done under the guise of combatting misinformation. That’s not all, however, that the DOJ wrote. Breitbart claims that it provided two main arguments in its statement of interest:

1. Harms to the competition provided by diverse rival sources in the news marketplace amounts to antitrust injuries that is protect by the Sherman Antitrust Act

2. The Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits concerted action that unreasonably restrains trade reaches restrains on viewpoint competition

This is not the DOJ’s not Slater’s first move against big tech. Breitbart notes that both took issue with Google previously, arguing the company “had illegally maintained a monopoly on the search market.” Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD’s general counsel, said in a statement that she hopes the DOJ’s interest will help move the CHD’s case forward.

At IFA, we’ve been censoring before for providing news that goes against the mainstream. We know how important it is to fight censorship online, so let’s pray into this case!

Share your prayers and scriptures for the DOJ and the CHD below.

(Excerpt from Breitbart. Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)