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Terms of Disservice. Dipayan Ghosh
Читать онлайн.Название Terms of Disservice
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780815737667
Автор произведения Dipayan Ghosh
Издательство Ingram
All this outcry is forcing a much-needed impact on the public’s perception of the consumer internet industry’s overall contribution to American society. About that, there can be no doubt.
As British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once noted, a week is a long time in politics. Silicon Valley once stood untouchable. But the recent criticism of the consumer internet industry’s business model has encouraged even national political leaders in the United States to issue sharp rhetoric—and in some cases back it up with action. Policymaker concerns regarding perceived overreaches of Silicon Valley start with the president himself. Whatever one might think of the genuineness of his intentions, President Donald Trump has seemingly plucked lines directly from Barry Lynn’s Open Markets Institute team, noting that the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon present a “very antitrust situation.”11 He pulls at conservative heartstrings to formulate his argument, proclaiming that the algorithms developed and used by these companies fail to offer the user politically balanced perspectives when it comes to American politics or his presidency itself, as his Twitter posts demonstrate:
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation—will be addressed!12
Something is happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it. It’s collusive, and it’s very, very fair to say we have to do something about it.13
Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch.14
Trump’s concerns fueled a major inquiry by former U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions, who issued a broad invitation to state attorneys general to convene with him and discuss the possibility of driving greater transparency into the ways in which the content-prioritization algorithms used by these companies are developed, to the end of determining whether the president’s broader implications of bias against conservatives might actually be true.15 To date, all three branches of the federal government have raised new antitrust inquiries, with investigations led by the Justice Department16 and Federal Trade Commission,17 the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law,18 and an expansive group of state attorneys general.19
This is an illustrative bellwether of the kind of regulatory comeuppance we may see over the coming years. These inquiries and related inquiries are still under development, and whether any regulatory results will emerge remains unclear. The feelings underlying such efforts persist and have seeped into the heart of American politics—including the U.S. Senate. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) presaged Trump’s inquiry, asking Mark Zuckerberg during his April 2018 congressional testimony whether Facebook represents “a First Amendment speaker expressing your views or … a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?” Senator Cruz added in the same hearing that “there are a great many Americans who I would say are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.”20 The allegation that these companies have organized among themselves inordinate amounts of power, so much so that they can negatively influence the social welfare, was overtly made by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who asked Zuckerberg point blank whether he believed his company was a monopoly.21
The inquiries have stretched across the aisle; in fact, most Democrats would quite likely contend that it was they who initially fueled the ongoing techlash. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has been on record since the presidential election in 2016 about the need to force changes to the way internet commerce works and in October 2017 proposed the Honest Ads Act to the Senate.22 Joined by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and the late–Arizona Senator John McCain (a Republican who was later replaced in cosponsorship by Senator Graham), Warner has been the most vocal advocate for political ad transparency and consumer privacy, among other matters of technology and telecommunications regulation.23 Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), from the 2020 presidential campaign trail, expressed great concern about growing market concentration across various sectors24—very much in line with the perspective of the Open Markets Institute, which has outlined how dozens of industries have significantly increased in market concentration in recent years. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI), having shared novel legislative and regulatory ideas with his congressional colleagues through his leadership of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, has shown tremendous thought leadership and political courage in attempting to address the overreaches of the technology industry with action.25 Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), meanwhile, has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should potentially face a prison term because he has “repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy” and “ought to be held personally accountable.”26
This political rhetoric is not exclusive to the United States. Other jurisdictions have already taken far more strident steps. The European Union, long a bastion of individual privacy rights and the maintenance of the economic strength and intellectual independence of the individual, has laid out a number of innovative rules and regulations that will significantly impact internet commerce if they are upheld to the word. This starts with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the novel regime pertaining to the collection and use of data associated with EU citizens that went into effect in May 2018.27 The United Kingdom, on the heels of Brexit, followed suit with a scathing parliamentary committee report on Facebook and the disinformation problem, describing the actions of the firm and its chief executive as those of “digital gangsters” and suggesting that Zuckerberg will be held in contempt should he set foot in the United Kingdom as long as he fails to respond to Parliament’s many inquiries about his company’s actions.28 The unprecedented joint International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News, chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Bob Zimmer and composed of high-ranking officials from many nations, has called for the senior leaders at Facebook—not its local staffers or lower-ranking policy officials—to show up and testify before the committee.29 The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development convened expansive meetings in 2019, in reference to which Secretary-General Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi noted that “Digitalization … has led to winner-take-all dynamics in digital markets,” and that “economies of scale and network effects have led to single dominant firms in e-commerce, online search, online advertising, and social networking,” which has “given these firms significant control over consumer data.”30
The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), the French office responsible for data regulation, has conducted numerous investigations and levied fines against the industry, including a fine of €50 million against Google “for lack of transparency, inadequate information, and the lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization.”31 Australia’s commercial regulatory agency, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC), has suggested that the internet industry has visited tremendous harm on consumers; the agency has made rigorous new proposals to advance technology regulation.32 Japan has opened discussions around new legislation to regulate digital giants, which are perceived in the country to have harmed market competition.33 It has also set up committees to explore the potential impact of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency on monetary policy and financial regulation.34 Singapore and Germany have proposed stringent new content policy standards targeting hate speech disseminated over social media platforms.35 In Belgium, a Brussels court ruled that Facebook had broken privacy laws and ordered the company to delete the illegal data, although Facebook has challenged those claims.36 The Italian privacy