On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, top Republicans have mounted their own campaign against Silicon Valley, even forcing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify at a recent hearing about accusations of censorship. GOP leaders have threatened to force Google's leading executives to do the same.
But the political attacks morphed into a new, real threat of stinging regulation earlier this month, when the Justice Department announced it would gather state attorneys general on Sept. 25 to discuss the tech industry, its filtering practices online and the implications for antitrust. For Facebook, Google, Twitter and their peers, the session seemed poised to open the door for the federal and state government to coordinate and begin fresh investigations of their business practices.
All month, those companies' lobbyists also had been buzzing about a potential White House executive order that aimed "to protect competition and small businesses from bias in online platforms," according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post. If signed by the president, it would task federal agencies - including the independent Justice Department - to "investigate/and or prosecute" companies that use their "market power in a way that harms consumers." The draft document ultimately leaked Friday, published by Bloomberg News, to whom a White House official said it was under consideration.
Aides at the White House said all week that the National Economic Council - which would have been tasked under the draft order to help agencies probe online bias - didn't write it and didn't know where it came from. Nor did the White House's top tech policy hub, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, two White House sources said. Trump has often ordered aides to write executive orders that were later deemed unworkable, but another senior White House official said he had no knowledge of this one.
"It would be entirely insane," said one lawyer with knowledge of the document, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The document has floated to tech companies such as Facebook and lawyers at white-shoe firms around Washington. In fact, the first that many at OSTP had even heard of an executive order came from an email sent by an unlikely source: Yelp, the reviews site. The company long has attacked Google for abusing its market power, albeit by limiting the reach of some of its competitors in search results and not political bias. Still, Luther Lowe, senior vice president for policy at Yelp, contacted multiple White House aides in September with the draft executive order, according to two White House aides and a copy of an email shared with The Post.
Reached this weekend, Lowe did not address whether he wrote or commissioned the executive order. "Far from riding the current tech backlash, Yelp has been consistently critical of Google for actual bias in search results - in local search, for their own competitive benefit," he said in a statement. "We believe this anti-competitive conduct - biasing their results in favor of their own house properties - to be a violation of US antitrust law and we have been urging both political parties in Congress, the Administration and regulators to investigate and prosecute this illegal bias."