The subcommittee that has Big Tech in its crosshairs
The chair of a 13-member House Judiciary Committee subdivision is in the news as politicians investigate Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple’s monopoly power. But first, a few words on Kobe Bryant.
I’m as stunned now as I was when I found out about Kobe Bryant’s death yesterday afternoon. I was sitting near the host’s stand at Harlem’s BLVD Bistro waiting for my brunch reservation when my friend overheard someone breaking the news to their party.
Even though I was a few feet away from the DJ station, the volume of the ‘90s hits blaring from the speaker faded in intensity as I succumbed to shock. Even though the restaurant was standing-room-only, my legs legit felt like they’d give out at any moment. All I could do was text my Dad; I couldn’t be with the devastation all by myself.
Dad and I became Lakers fans when Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls and Phil Jackson became the Lakers coach in 2000. Kobe was entering his prime as I entered the formative years of my life. My dad and I obsessed over Kobe’s basketball instincts and IQ: How he moved without the ball on offense, plugged passing lanes on defense and never shied away from the pressure of crunch time. We were proud Kobe was on our team.
I remember in 2002 when I begged my parents to buy me the team’s new white alternate jersey — the ones that are only played on Sundays — to wear to school. I was an athlete at the time but didn’t really dress like one. This wasn’t just any jersey though. It was Kobe’s jersey.
High school didn’t always feel like a safe space for me. I was figuring myself out in a culture that didn’t center many people who looked or loved like me. Folks were either trying to tell me who I was or abuse me because they didn’t like who they thought I was. My #8 jersey felt like my version of Superman’s cape. It gave me an edge that empowered me to take up for myself in ways my Express sweaters and American Eagle polo shirts didn’t. The man was imperfect like all of us, but he played and lived with a rousing spirit that inspired me that represented an alternative to how my 16-year-old self was just going through the motions.
My heart aches for Kobe’s wife Vanessa and his daughters Natalia, Bianka and Capri, the families of the unnamed and unknown victims and everyone who knows and loves Mamba. I pray Kobe and Gigi rest peacefully.
In “Big Tech had its chance,” I wrote:
I've heard the argument that it's up to the companies — not consumers and the government — to clean up the messes they've made. I'd agree if I believed they were up to the task. But if the past decade or two has taught us anything, it’s that Big Tech executives proved themselves to be in over their heads.
As Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician and author of Weapons of Math Destruction wrote for Bloomberg in 2018 about “Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook [and] all those Google Nerds”:
The way I see it, these guys — and they are mostly guys — were arbitrarily chosen. They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery. Little did they know or care what problems they were creating. And now, they’re being asked to solve — or acknowledge, or something — some really big issues, such as what to do about people who use their platforms to meddle in elections or spread lies, paranoia, bigotry and straight-up hate.
The world expects great things of them because they’re supposed to be geniuses. Problem is, they’re not. There’s nothing they can do except apologize, turn off their big machines and walk away. I doubt they’ll do that. Instead, they’re manufacturing baloney explanations about how they’ll use more technology, or maybe more people, to handle the civic duties they had hoped to avoid.
My money’s on independent creators, democracy and mindful consumers over Big Tech all day every day. Yours should be too.
On the democracy front, Politico published a profile by Nancy Scola and Cristiano Lima of David Cicilline, a Democratic congressman from Rhode Island and chairman of the House subcommittee on antitrust who is overseeing an investigation into whether Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are illegally anti-competitive.
Cicilline’s subcommittee describes the investigation, which was announced last June, as a “top-to-bottom review” focused on three main areas:
Documenting competition problems in digital markets
Examining whether dominant firms are engaging in anti-competitive conduct
Assessing whether existing antitrust laws, competition policies and current enforcement levels are adequate to address these issues
From Scola and Lima’s Politico report:
Unlike the Federal Trade Commission, Cicilline can’t issue fines. Unlike the Justice Department, he can’t bring criminal charges. He can’t single-handedly pass new laws. He needs the blessing of his committee chairman, New York’s Jerry Nadler, just to issue subpoenas. What he can do, and has done, is to convene high-profile hearings, inscribe evidence extracted from the tech companies into the public record, and turn his office into a safe space for those frightened by the Big Four. But that doesn’t mean that Silicon Valley’s critics haven’t invested a great deal of hope in what David Cicilline does next.
The reporters note that Cicilline hopes the investigation takes the public (and his unknowing colleagues) under the hood of the Four to “describe in intricate detail to the rest of Washington exactly how the engines of Silicon Valley work.” This is accomplished, in large part, by public hearings — five of which have been held so far — and by working with smaller companies who are afraid to testify in public court but could provide key evidence in future legal cases.
Peter Kafka at Recode wrote an excellent recap of one of the subcommittee’s recent public hearings where “top executives from four smaller, competing companies — the wireless speaker company Sonos, the cellphone grip maker PopSockets, the gadget startup Tile, and the business software company Basecamp — laid out their complaints” against Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple.
Of personal interest was the notion of “monopoly rent.” From Kafka’s reporting:
Monopoly rent, in this instance, is the idea that a company without competition can charge higher-than-market-rate prices or can charge extra fees simply because of its unmatched position. For David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder and chief technology officer at the small business software company Basecamp, one complaint is the fact that Google allows Basecamp competitors to pay Google to appear as the first listing in search results when someone searches for “Basecamp.”
Google has “replaced that search engine with an ad engine instead,” he said, and consumers “are not being presented with what they’re actually looking for.”
“It’s a complete shakedown,” he added.
A Google spokesperson provided Recode a statement that read: “For trademarked terms like the name of a business, our policy balances the interest of both users and advertisers. Like other platforms, we allow competitors to bid on trademarked terms because it offers users more choice when they are searching. However, if a trademark owner files a complaint, we will block competitors from using their business name in the actual ad text.”
There’s also the argument against how these companies collect and monetize our personal data. More from Recode’s Peter Kafka:
According to a 2019 eMarketer report, Facebook and Google account for a combined 60 percent of the US online advertising market, thanks in large part to all the data they collect about how their users browse and search online.
Heinemeier Hansson, of Basecamp, argued that “you cannot opt out of this data collection” if you want to use large swaths of the internet today. His big proposal for balancing the playing field and restoring more consumer privacy online: He wants to ban advertising that is targeted to online users based on the dossiers that Facebook and Google build for marketers, which could simultaneously lower the tech giants’ appetite for data collection while potentially improving competition in the advertising industry.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.
The most common solution proposed by academics, politicians and journalists is to “break up” Big Tech to inspire innovation and equitably redistribute economic power. This would require Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, Apple to spin off the App Store, Google to spin off YouTube and Amazon to spin off Amazon Web Services, its multibillion-dollar cloud service.
For the record, I agree that Big Tech should be broken up because I think companies with monopoly power threaten our democracy and digital well-being. I don’t, however, think a breakup would solve the fundamental issues with these companies including microtargeting, worker compensation and algorithms that reward outrageous and fantastical content.
In “Don't Break Up Big Tech,” an article published to WIRED last week, Zachary Karabell wrote:
What we need now is a new regulatory framework based on today’s issues: privacy, who owns and profits from data, competition, and innovation. Those should be the starting points for developing policy, in place of a focus on the size or number of tech companies. We need to ask what rules would protect consumers, ensure continued innovation, and allow for competition, without creating additional, unintended problems. The answer isn’t likely to look like the ones that were developed more than 100 years ago; and shoehorning today’s challenges into that 20th-century mold may only make things worse. “Break them up” has the virtue of sounding simple, and all the vices of being simplistic. We have real issues that need creative thinking; the regulations of the past, which didn’t work so well even then, are not an answer.
But regulation won’t come without the partisan politics we’ve grown used to from our elected officials. From “Surprise, surprise: our elected officials are unable to agree on a critical policy”:
The two parties diverge on a key issue: private right to action, which would give consumers a third layer of protection from tech companies who violate privacy and data rules. Democrats broadly support a private-right-to-action provision because they feel it will hold tech companies liable for the data scandals the create. Republicans, of course, disagree. They think consumers will file lawsuits all willy-nilly that end up crippling small businesses instead of Big Tech.
“Private right of action for marginalized communities is really critical,” Dylan Gilbert, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, said to The Verge. “Marginalized communities historically haven’t been able to rely on the government to protect their interests. It’s really important that individuals can have their own day in court.”
Ari Ezra Waldman, director of the New York Law School’s Innovation Center for Law and Technology told The Verge that lawsuits over misused data would enforce the law and steer companies toward better practices. “First you have to be subject to the statute, and you have to violate the statute, and then someone actually has to know that you’re violating that statute,” Waldman said. “It’s far more likely that that’s going to affect larger players and the worst actors.”
I’ve been vocal in my critiques of the personal-data-based business models that fuel Facebook and Google’s digital advertising duopoly, Amazon’s alleged warehouse workplace conditions, and social media’s unhealthy “mutual transaction ecosystem.” But I’m not ignorant to the fact that these businesses are unlikely to self-regulate because there’s no incentive to do so.
Shareholders and executives, with their money-over-everything mentalities, are the benefactors of these billion-dollar entities. And, perhaps most importantly, these companies still enjoy favorable public opinion. From “The internet after social media”:
The lack of urgency to imagine the internet after social media could be explained by the favorable public opinion tech companies still benefit from. In Brian Barth’s aforementioned New Yorker piece, he cited research from a recent Pew Center poll that found around half of Americans think the tech industry is having a positive impact on society (compared to seven in ten in 2015). Google and Amazon came in second and third in a survey of millennials’ favorite brands conducted earlier this year. People are more worried about the behavior of banks and pharmaceutical companies than tech companies. And most have yet to meaningfully change their consumption habits.
Until a critical mass of consumers calls for the government to constrain the, it’ll be business as usual, save for an occasional cosmetic feature update.