Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Florida State Representative Randy Fine to the newsmakers line to discuss his two-pronged attack on Big Tech.
Leahy: In studio, the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. on the newsmaker line State Representative Randy Fine from Florida. Welcome, Representative Fine.
Fine: Thanks for having me.
Leahy: Well, we have something in common. You’re a Harvard grad as I am. You’re a Harvard Business School grad. You are a Baker Scholar. You know this, but for our listeners, Baker Scholars are really smart. There are about 600 members of every Harvard Business School class. The top 10 percent are Baker Scholars. A strong academic record before you got into business.
Fine: Well, thank you. My mom is certainly proud of me. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: Yeah, that is a great line. We’re cracking up on that one.
Carmichael: Bless the moms.
Fine: Well thank you.
Leahy: You have also had some experience in the hospitality industry for some years. And now you are a state representative from Melbourne, Florida and you have introduced perhaps one of the best concepts I’ve heard of in some time to bring some accountability to the censors at Big Tech and Google and Facebook and Twitter. Tell us about the letter you sent to Governor DeSantis.
Fine: Well, Big Tech is making a big deal about the fact that they can choose who they do business with. They don’t like conservative thought and they’ll just take apps off their platforms or censor people from their sites. Well, we can do that too. And in Florida, we invest billions of dollars and we buy billions of dollars of products from these companies. And so we’ve introduced legislation to have the state stop doing business with these Big Tech companies that are making these totalitarian moves.
Leahy: Would you have the pension fund there, I guess it’s like $200 billion under management. Would they both divest their ownership and in Facebook, Twitter, Google, Alphabet which owns Google, and then also stop using them as vendors? Is that the legislation you’ve proposed?
Fine: It’s a two-pronged attack. One is divesting which will put pressure on the stock price. But the other idea is to stop purchasing. so we buy 100s of millions if not, billions of dollars of products from these five companies every year. And to create a market for companies that want to do business with everybody.
Leahy: What are the prospects of that legislation? Where does this stand Now? Is it going to turn into reality?
Fine: Well, we filed the legislation and we’ve gotten a great reaction from folks. I believe that we’re going to do something in Florida. I’m fairly convinced that Governor Ron DeSantis has said this is our top legislative priority for the year. I’m just figuring out how to hold these companies accountable. Because it’s scary. When the president of the United States can get censored anyone can.
And when these companies use their monopoly power to take competitors to Facebook and Twitter like Parler they simply shut them down that’s scary. because when companies begin engaging in one-sided viewpoint discrimination, who decides what is appropriate and what is not appropriate? And that sliding scale gets very dangerous very quickly.
Leahy: Now tell us a little bit about the Florida State Legislature. It meets in Tallahassee. You’re in the State House of Representatives. There’s a state senate there. How many state reps are there? What’s the party mix? And how many state senators are there?
Fine: We have 120 members of the House of which 78 are Republicans. We almost have a supermajority two-thirds status. In the Senate, there are 40 members of which 24 are Republicans. So the margin is not as substantial, but it’s still the majority. And this legislation has been filed not only on the house side by me but on the Senate side by Senator Joe Gruters who’s the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.
Leahy: Here in Tennessee our legislature is called the Tennessee General Assembly meets in session for a period of time. Typically starting in January And. by late April late May, it’s done with its work. Is it the same in Florida, or is it like some other states with a full-time legislative process?
Fine: No, we are not a full-time legislature. In fact, we had the largest state in the country that does not have a full-time legislature. We’ve found that we’re much like Tennessee. we meet for 60 days every year. And in this year in odd number years not election years, we meet in March and April.
But before that 60-day session, we typically have five to six interim committee weeks where committees begin doing their business and can start hearing bills. But nothing will be voted on on the floor until March. We can come back for a special session which has happened a couple of times in my time in the legislature but generally we meet that once a year.
Listen to the full hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Florida Capitol” by DXR. CC BY-SA 4.0.
