Latest Trump tantrum targets Big Tech

SINCE the arrival of the Internet Age and the rise of the information technology companies, Republicans and conservatives have maintained an ambivalent relationship with the high-tech industries in Silicon Valley that have helped transformed the US economy and become a symbol of American global innovation.

On the one hand, computer companies like Microsoft, Apple and Dell, and the many startups they helped propel, demonstrated that American style capitalism has become a wave of the future. Communism collapsed and the values of free market economies as championed by the late Republican President Ronald Reagan were going to rule the world.

Republicans applauded in the 1990s the policies promoted by then Democratic President Bill Clinton that removed most government regulatory obstacles to the expansion of the information industry. And Republican lawmakers opposed attempts by Democrats to challenge what they regarded as Microsoft's monopoly in the software industry.