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Terms of Disservice. Dipayan Ghosh
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isbn 9780815737667
Автор произведения Dipayan Ghosh
Издательство Ingram
The inquiries have reached a local level in the United States, too. California has passed a much-anticipated privacy law, lauded as the most stringent in the country.40 Illinois has attempted to enforce a powerful new biometric privacy law targeting Facebook’s facial-recognition technology.41 New York City has convened an expert group to examine how algorithmic transparency and interpretability are critical to maintaining fairness for residents (though questions have been raised about those efforts).42 Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and many other states have either taken similar action or are expected to follow suit over the next few years.43
The commercial engine underlying Silicon Valley appears to be under attack.
The Consumer Internet: A New Paradigm
And so a new paradigm shift—riding the wave of the techlash—is in full swing. The world is descending on the consumer internet industry. People are angry, politicians are taking swings, and governments loom. The internet, once a forum for positive sharing, now carries the brand of promoting an industry of cutthroat capitalists who nip at the heels of American democracy. We have developed and adopted a powerful new theory of the case, just as Copernicus once did: The leading internet firms are not God’s gift to the world. They can cause grave harm just as past industries have. At their heart of hearts, their nature is defined by profit-seeking in a manner that lacks any nonmarket-driven accountability to the public.
But this new condition raises a question: Given our sorry political circumstances, can anything really happen? Particularly if it is in the realm of polarized partisanship where economic regulation squarely sits? Will the full weight of our federal legislative and regulatory powers really be brought to bear on what is now the world’s most profitable and powerful industry—especially in a period of gridlock in which the U.S. Senate cannot even execute a politically independent impeachment trial?
Consider the Zuckerberg hearings, as well as those over the past three years that have involved the other major consumer internet companies. Despite all of the public anticipation leading up to those congressional inquiries, all we got in the end were some memes of members fumbling as they confusedly questioned the industry. Recall, for instance, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), who asked a question about sending e-mails over WhatsApp, or Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who asked about how Facebook makes money.44 Since the hearings, these interactions have been explained away with rationalizations. Senator Schatz says that his was an earnest misstatement,45 and Senator Hatch’s office has fairly indicated that he simply meant to underscore earlier discussion from the hearing,46 both of which are likely true but nevertheless have influenced the public attitude concerning Congress’s ability to regulate the industry according to its economic merits.47
The underlying question remains: will these hearings and all of the accompanying congressional scrutiny over the industry have lasting impact? The first of these hearings, in late 2017, explored possible interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Consider what new material was actually learned during its course. The lawyers representing Sean Edgett, Richard Salgado, and Colin Stretch—the legal executives at Twitter, Google, and Facebook, respectively48—effectively served their clients by not revealing anything that might encourage regulatory ardor and suggesting that their companies had simply been caught off guard by the Russians.
I continue to have faith in the political process—and as my colleagues Gene Kimmelman, Phil Verveer, and Tom Wheeler have suggested in the past, we need more congressional hearings.49 The congressional forum and its lines of inquiry are the only way to force the industry to defend its practices—or accede to regulation. We need only to design more effectively the right hearings at the right time and in the process bring in the right people and ask the right questions—particularly about the nature of the companies’ business practices and whether and how those practices tread on the American interest.
In the meantime, I would encourage a thorough intellectual reassessment of everything we think we know and understand about the causes of the harms against democracy that have been systematically perpetrated by this industry. Such an assessment must begin with the business model at the heart of the consumer internet.
Grounding an Analysis of the Modern Internet
Numerous industry officials, policy experts, and legal scholars have written about the business models of internet companies in varied contexts, but much of this analysis lacks depth. For instance, some have suggested that for internet firms, or more specifically social media companies, “the business model is targeted advertising.” Indeed, these are the terms in which Zuckerberg describes how his company makes money, as he quipped in response to Orrin Hatch: “Senator, we run ads.”50 But the way Facebook truly operates is far more complex. Zuckerberg did not go into close enough detail to depict the business model in the resolution necessary for Congress to begin to address the internet industry’s root problems.
Building on his judgment that the industry simply runs off ads, some have additionally argued that internet companies should be encouraged (or forced) to make their services available for some subscription fee as an alternative to their current business model premised on advertising. Yet if Facebook were to convert all of its “free” users into paying subscribers, relieving them of targeted advertisements and content curation in their social feeds, then perhaps we could effectively blunt the formation of polarized filter bubbles and diminish the disinformation problem.51 But the idea that Facebook should simply switch to a subscription model to protect American democracy, as Roger McNamee, Jared Lanier, and others have suggested, carries deep flaws.52 If subscription were a requirement for all users, the number of people using the platform would fall so drastically—especially in developing countries—that the benefits of social media would be severely diminished. Such wellsprings of free thought and expression over Facebook that prompted the Arab Spring would be stopped in their tracks, if all of the people who participated in the Arab Spring were suddenly required to pay $100 a year for Facebook access.
Even if users were given a choice between the continuation of targeted ads and content curation in their news feeds and having to pay a steady subscription fee, none of the problems that our democracy is currently facing would be earnestly addressed; they simply would be ignored. Imagine the entire American social media market being presented the opportunity to subscribe. How would users respond? At the rate of $100—or anything within that order of magnitude—not nearly enough people would switch. This leaves aside the question of users in developing nations that might feature greater political instability. Indeed, it is perhaps the people who would be most unwilling to make the payments for social media subscriptions whose news feeds we should worry most about. (Another option exists, too: a scheme whereby Facebook assesses your wealth—having inferred it through analysis of your personal information—and offers you a price-discriminating fee that by design is valued proportional to your spending ability. We can throw this option out the window, though. It remains highly unrealistic at this stage, as large-scale internet firms are not poised to take such a discriminating approach because of the obvious public outcry that would rise against the brand.)
Overall, replacing advertising revenue with subscription fees would be insufficient to meaningfully address the negative externalities perpetrated by Twitter, for example. This analysis leaves aside additional critical questions we would eventually need to answer. For instance, should subscription be a voluntary industry measure or regulated by the government? If the latter, should regulators impose the subscription restrictions only on large internet companies such as Twitter, or should they pull small start-ups into the regulation as well? If they choose not to regulate smaller companies, would users move to newer platforms that do not maintain the subscription requirement? And how much should companies charge for the subscription in the first place? Academics in the United States have estimated both the amount a typical consumer is willing to pay to use social media and a user’s worth in annual dollar terms to the social media companies. But if Twitter were to charge the same flat rate for everyone, much larger