America’s Gross Domestic Product rebounds as the economy shows dramatic changes for the future…and a single sentence in a law few people even know about sets off a firestorm on Capitol Hill.

Economists breathed a sigh of relief when news of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (or GDP) broke Thursday morning. GDP is measured as the total goods and services produced in a given period. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce‘s Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP for the third quarter rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 33.1 percent.

This history making third quarter jump was the largest output gain since the 1940s when the government first began to track GDP data. Certain sectors of the American economy have grown as a direct result of the COVID crisis and other areas of business and commerce have all but ended. The big four technology companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook together are worth more than $5 trillion, and they largely carried the US economy during 2020.

Contrast that with the earnings of big oil companies like Conoco Phillips. This week the oil giant stated it lost $450 million in the third quarter as low crude prices and reduced production cut into corporate profits. Conoco Phillips reported a total third-quarter loss of almost 50 percent from the previous year: From earnings of $2.3 billion in quarter three of 2019 to $1.2 billion this week. By any measure, this is a huge hit to the bottom line of an iconic American company.

Senators from both major political parties vigorously questioned the CEO’s of Facebook, Twitter, and Google regarding their policies of content moderation. At issue was the now infamous Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act of 1996. While the statute is clear that no “provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher,” the issues of concern regard the accuracy of that requirement by these media giants who wield such vast influence in the collective thinking of the nation.

Legally, no one is forced to use Facebook or Twitter or Google. There is no law mandating their use by anyone. Yet, these three companies have grown into such large corporations that legal authorities and government regulators are wondering if these companies have slipped the bounds of a private corporation and now serve as public utilities.

False information communicated on a public platform is being likened to yelling fire in a crowded theater by many political leaders. The question before Congress is what, exactly, is the role of government in the actions of a private company? Anti-trust lawsuits can serve as a check on corporate power that moves beyond appropriate limits, but when political leaders begin to object to statements simply because they do not resonate with their beliefs or preferences, what should be done? Should the force of regulation be applied to a private company’s content moderation policy? If so, how, by whom, and for what?