| Hey, it's Josh. Conventional wisdom has long held that the only thing Republicans and Democrats could agree on was that they didn't like Big Tech. But this week, that bipartisan alliance—forged over a shared disdain for Silicon Valley and its growing influence—started to show some cracks. The spat started over the weekend. At an event in Brooklyn, Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler called for breaking up companies like Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. "It goes way beyond the fact that they misbehave, it's the fact that that kind of power is allowed to exist," Nadler said, according to video of the event posted in a tweet. "That kind of power cannot be allowed to exist in society." In less than 24 hours, those statements had drawn ire from the GOP. The ensuing dust-up was a reminder that the depth of the bipartisan agreement on reining in Big Tech has yet to be tested, even as the Washington antitrust battle heats up. On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a probe into many of the industry's recent acquisitions. Nadler is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, whose subcommittee on antitrust is helming a bipartisan investigation into the market power of the tech industry. Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the committee, and Jim Sensenbrenner, another GOP member involved with the investigation, sent an open letter to Nadler on Monday, accusing him of poisoning the process. "We will not participate in an investigation with pre-conceived conclusions that America's large tech companies are inherently bad, cannot be allowed to exist in society, and must be broken up," they wrote. It's unclear how much impact the Nadler-Collins imbroglio will have on the larger antitrust landscape. The Republican Congressmen didn't make it clear how, exactly, they would follow through on their threat. And one person who has been deeply involved in the investigation told me not to expect significant problems ahead. The person asked not to be identified discussing private information because they weren't authorized to speak about it publicly. On the one hand, the flare-up seemed silly. Nadler was voicing a commonly-held belief in Democratic circles, and one that isn't that far from what he's said publicly in the past. Similarly, the Republicans' objection that big companies shouldn't be automatically seen as bad is a pretty anodyne opinion within the GOP. These philosophical differences haven't gotten in the way of the investigation so far, so what's changed? It could be something as small as Collins's political situation (he's running for Senate this fall). But the flap also reflects actual differences without easy resolutions. Democrats and Republicans really do see the government's role in regulating businesses in different ways. That's a big reason why there hasn't been much movement on a federal privacy bill, despite the superficial agreement that privacy is a problem. Nor are there any other examples of bipartisan legislation on tech that have any real momentum. There is a broad investigation into alleged antitrust behavior by Alphabet Inc.'s Google with cooperation from nearly every state attorney general, but it's far too early to tell whether the parties will actually agree on a solution. Broad bipartisan action against Purdue Pharma LP, the company that makes Oxycontin, buckled along party lines once it came time to decide what the recourse should be. Both parties seem to share a visceral dislike for tech companies and their executives. That is enough to make life uncomfortable for Silicon Valley in Washington. But if public officials plan on actually doing something together, it'll take more than a mutual lack of affection for Mark Zuckerberg. —Joshua Brustein | 
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