Big Tech
Big Tech
“They have taken advantage of our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human psychology, to gather and exploit private data, and to craft business models that do not protect users from harm.”
Roger McNamee (in 'Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe)
This page is under contruction. The intention is to provide some constructive ideas and information on the what could/should happen to the Big Tech companies
— as discussed in Objective 2
of the Battle for Truth Strategy: "Dismantle the digital monopolies, increase platforms’ transparency and accountability, and regulate surveillance capitalism." For the moment the page is being used as a holding area for potentially useful material.
Page Contents
1 General
A handful of big tech companies — some digital monopolies — profit most from the current Internet architecture, the so-called FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix
& Google) and their Chinese equivalents, Renren
(Facebook), JD.com
(Amazon), Baidu
(Google) and Sina Weibo
(Twitter). These monoliths have systematically wiped out the competition, either by buying them out or undercutting their markets — or in the case of China, the government denying Western platforms permission to operate. So the problem we face today is not so much that we've got too many commercial services, but too few, and the providers of those services are using aggressive and intrusive business models.
a) Breaking up the Big Techs?
There's a brief discussion of whether the Big Tech Corporations should be broken up in 'Can We Fix the Internet?' The discussion [in Section 3.2] references James Ball's recent book
'The System: who owns the internet, and how it owns us' in which Ball argues that "tackling tech giants one at a time is simply a global game of whack-a-cyber-mole. Take one down, and before too long something all too similar will take its place."
b) Understanding the Scale of the Problem
To understand the challenge of controlling or regulating what appears on the internet / social media platforms, it is important to be aware of the sheer volume of material that is being uploaded across dozens of different platforms.
The graphic shows what happens in a 60 seconds. [For a larger version see here.]
c) Will America’s “Big Tech” firms be reined in?
"US lawmakers are deciding whether to act against the country’s powerful tech giants. Some believe the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are stifling competition. The companies have made huge profits during the Covid crisis and critics believe they will use this cash to buy competitors." Check out this excellent analysis in
The Inquiry
[BBC World Service, 10 Aug 20].
Image: Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google
CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple
CEO Tim Cook
d) Responding to Criticism
There's a section on the Videos Page
on how the various tech giants have responded to criticism — and threats from advertisers — that they are not doing enough to combat fake news and disinformation. In March 2018 Facebook
announced a major change in policy and subsequently published a useful video on the topic; and Google
has taken action to help promote quality journalism...
2 Relevant Legislation
a) The Sherman Antitrust Act [1890]
The Sherman Antitrust Act
of 1890 is a US antitrust law that regulates competition among enterprises.
The Act — named after its principal author Senator John Sherman — broadly prohibits anticompetitive agreements and unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.
The Act authorizes the Department of Justice to prohibit conduct violating the Act, and additionally authorizes private parties injured by conduct violating the Act to bring suits for treble damages (i.e. three times as much money in damages as the violation cost them). Over time, the federal courts have developed a body of law under the Sherman Act
making certain types of anticompetitive conduct per se illegal, and subjecting other types of conduct to case-by-case analysis regarding whether the conduct unreasonably restrains trade.
The purpose of the Sherman Act
is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses. It attempts to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply. 'Innocent monopoly', or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. [Extract from Wikipedia]
b) The 1996
Communications Decency Act
The 1996 Communications Decency Act
is a landmark piece of US legislation, often cited as the most important tool ever created for free speech on the internet. It includes a crucial ‘safe harbor’ provision that gives online platforms legal immunity from most of the content posted by their users: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This is Section 230.
As Wired
put it, this is, in a nutshell, “the statutory glue behind everything you love and hate about the internet… Safe harbor has allowed the modern internet to flourish, which means it has also enabled the most powerful companies in modern history — with the best lawyers money can buy. If Silicon Valley is the capitalist equivalent of Superman, Section 230 is its yellow sun, the source of invincibility for Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and all the rest.” Legal immunity is “great if you’re a tech company that has been able to thrive under it, but not so great for those who have suffered at the hands of anonymous trolls.” There's further discussion of this important Act here.
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Notes
1
The motto on the logo, 'E Pluribus Unum', is Latin for "out of many, one." It was once the motto of the United States of America and references the fact that the cohesive single nation was formed as the result of the thirteen smaller colonies joining together.
