Political issues around big tech companies
The technology industry has an increasingly complex relationship to government and politics, most importantly in three areas:
- Privacy and surveillance.
- Censorship.
- Antitrust, general economic regulation, and other competition management.
Here’s some of what I think about that, plus links to a lot more.
1. For a long time, I’ve maintained:
- Privacy and surveillance are very big deals.
- Ultimately, they cannot be handled effectively without direct regulation of specific permitted and forbidden uses of data.
The first point is now widely accepted. The second unfortunately is not; laws and regulations generally state who may or may not record, keep or decrypt particular kinds of data, rather than what particular uses they may make of it.
2. Another threat to freedom has arisen as big as that from privacy/surveillance: a many-fronts push for censorship. It would ultimately be calamitous for free countries to agree that the threat of “Fake News” and other dangerous online partisanship justifies general censorship, by governments or “platform” tech companies as the case may be, yet that is exactly the path we seem to be on.
Fortunately, there are less dangerous ways to address the same challenges. I expect to make as much fuss about this issue in the upcoming decade as I have about privacy/surveillance over the past one.
3. There are increasingly many calls to break up large internet companies, under existing antitrust laws or perhaps new ones. There is some precedent for actual breakup of technology companies, mainly the 1982 breakup of AT&T/the Bell System in telephony and a couple of rounds of divestiture by the GE/RCA/NBC broadcasting/electronics companies in 1932 and 1942. More important, perhaps, have been less-than-breakup agreements to promote or allow competition, such as Bell’s 1956 agreement to license its patents for free, IBM’s 1956 agreement to compete somewhat fairly in professional services, IBM’s further agreement in 1969 to “completely” unbundle hardware, software and services, and Microsoft’s tolerance of independent web browsers.
As for some particular, recently suggested competition-protecting ideas:
- I agree with people like Elizabeth Warren that Facebook should never have been allowed to buy Instagram or WhatsApp, because those services are all different aspects of substantially the same business. And I’d support a forced divestiture now.
- I think Google has been a pretty responsible oligopolist, with little harmful overlap between its businesses, and doesn’t need to be broken up. But that also suggests a forced breakup, e.g. separating search from Android, wouldn’t do much harm.
- Amazon Web Services and Amazon’s online store are two quite separate businesses. Forcing a formal separation wouldn’t have many important consequences, good or bad.
- Here’s one where I differ strongly from Elizabeth Warren et al.: The idea of prohibiting a retailer from having “house branded” items is ridiculous. Supermarkets surely make over 100% of their profits from prepared foods that are pretty much all house branded. Companies that sell their own products online shouldn’t be prohibited from selling auxiliary third-party products as well. Amazon is no exception to this general rule.
- Finally, I have long favored a middle course on network neutrality. But if the only politically practical possibilities are the two obvious extremes, then I favor enforced neutrality by far over “any bias goes”.
And whatever happens otherwise in competition enforcement, I’d support antitrust exceptions for certain technology research and study — certainly in multiple security-related efforts, and perhaps around language understanding as well.
4. One interesting note is how commonly tech-related policy issues turn out to be non-/bi-partisan.
- Privacy/surveillance issues commonly are so, most extremely in the case of the Email Privacy Act, which passed the House of Representatives 419-0 despite being so controversial it actually never got through the Senate.
- Everybody’s mad at social media companies these days.
- The populist/anti-elitist aspect of pressure on tech companies seemed mainly like a right-wing/Steve Bannon thing … and then the backlash against New York’s proposed giveaway to Amazon happened. That was mainly from the left. Ditto, I imagine, for the San Francisco and Seattle residents who oppose gentrification.
Of course, there are exceptions, for example:
- Democrats generally support network neutrality and Republicans generally don’t.
- The Trump Administration’s opposition to immigration sometimes extends to tech workers and to students who may some day become such.
5. And finally, government procurement of technology has been a costly mess for many decades, worldwide, occasional improvements such as those during the Clinton Administration in the United States notwithstanding. And the cost is not just in money; with better knowledge management technology, the FBI might have connected dots to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Private-sector large-enterprise technology acquisition is no picnic either, but it’s a lot better than government’s. Government contracting procedures have got to be changed.
Related links
- I summarized many of the political threats to the tech industry in December, 2017.
- My posts directly focused on public policy in the area of privacy/surveillance include:
- Very chilling effects (July, 2013).
- What our legislators should do about privacy (and aren’t) (July, 2013).
- Where the privacy discussion needs to head (March, 2012).
- Essential questions of fair data use (July, 2010).
- Some of what I wrote about technology-related economic development in May, 2006 still holds true.
- I’ve long been on the skeptical side about technology patents.
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4 Responses to “Political issues around big tech companies”
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I believe that no censorship should be allowed on systems that send data over the internet. I believe that users should be able to optionally be able to sign up for MULTIPLE filters to shape the results that they see. Filters should be available from non-vendor open sources. Thus you can select a filter from the Catholic church, the NRA, the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. No filter provider can be excluded and no charges can per levied by the content/search sites.
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