As political polarization continues to plague Washington, a rare consensus is emerging between the left and the right that America’s largest technology companies must be subject to greater scrutiny.
US lawmakers are escalating their rhetoric against Silicon Valley, an industry that has long trafficked in its reputation as a leading source of innovation but is now under fire for what critics see as vast, unchecked power.
The shifting political tides come as calls to regulate technology companies have made strange bedfellows of the likes of the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and the ex-White House aide and Breitbart chief Steve Bannon.
Speaking in Hong Kong last week, Bannon, the former chief strategist to Donald Trump, reiterated his view that tech giants such as Facebook and Google should be regulated like “public utilities”.
The skepticism is shared by progressives such as Warren, who has warned of the monopolistic behavior of Google, Amazon and Apple while pushing for a renewed debate over antitrust laws.
And while the tech sector is anything but homogeneous, with each platform raising its own unique set of policy questions, the verdict on Washington’s Capitol Hill is increasingly clear: for too long, Silicon Valley has gotten a free pass.
“Silicon Valley is going from being heroes to villains,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s been brewing for quite a while, but there’s a big shift happening.”
On the right of the political spectrum, the big tech platforms are seen as socially liberal and “globalist” and therefore clash with core Republican positions on borders and immigration.
The recent furor at Google, which sacked an employee, Jamie Damore, after he penned a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, also drew fire from the right and dragged the major tech companies into the culture wars. Critics on the right claim Silicon Valley is politically and culturally monolithic and doesn’t tolerate non-liberal views.
The commodification of data and privacy is also starting to emerge as an issue for lawmakers.
Marsha Blackburn, a Republican representative from Tennessee, recently introduced a bill that would restore Federal Communications Commission privacy protections that members of her party killed earlier this year. The legislation would impose rules requiring companies ranging from Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to Facebook and Google to obtain customers’ consent before they can sell sensitive information, such as users’ browsing histories, to advertisers and other entities.
In the last week alone, lawmakers in the United States have pitted themselves against tech companies in disparate ways.
A Senate hearing held on Tuesday on a bill to combat online sex trafficking illuminated a rift over whether internet companies should be liable for user-generated content. In a separate matter, Facebook announced on Thursday it would hand over thousands of political advertisements to Congress that were purchased from Russian accounts as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US election.
The sex trafficking bill, which enjoys broad bipartisan support from 30 senators, has met with fervent opposition from the tech industry due to its proposed changes to a law that shields internet companies from liability over third-party content. But at the hearing, a representative from the group that lobbies on behalf of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter suggested there might yet be room for a compromise.
A Washington-based employee of at least one major tech company dismissed the grumbling on Capitol Hill. The employee, who requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations, countered that tech companies had been engaged on the sex trafficking issue and that the attacks from the Senate had “exaggerated the conflict”.
The sex trafficking debate and Russia inquiry are just two fronts in what could shape up to be a more protracted battle. And for the first time, policymakers and commentators in the US are starting to question who will pay the price of automation as it sets about transforming the labor market.
Already a battle is looming in Congress with the labor unions as they attempt to frustrate efforts to introduce legislation that would facilitate the widespread use of self-driving trucks, thus placing in jeopardy the livelihoods of close to 2 million American truckers.
As Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, noted in a recent post: “The new spotlight on these companies doesn’t come out of nowhere. They sit, substantively, at the heart of the biggest and most pressing issues facing the United States, and often stand on the less popular side of those: automation and inequality, trust in public life, privacy and security.”
But the issue involving Facebook underscores what observers say is emerging as the most pressing question before legislators as they weigh how to regulate the tech sector: who owns the data?
Forcing Facebook to hand over its information on election spending is being viewed as an initial victory for Silicon Valley’s critics in the debate over who has the rights to data. But by and large, critics argue that internet companies are not yet subject to any meaningful obligations with respect to how they harvest and use consumer data.
“The regulations are such that the penalties for not properly securing data are so weak that it’s not cost effective for tech companies to spend all this money on complex industrial security,” said Wadhwa. “We need to now have severe penalties for data breachers, and we may need to look at the entire ownership of data issue.”
The New Center Project, an endeavor that seeks to eschew political labels in favor of finding common ground, issued a series of policy recommendations including reining in the tech sector in order to “recenter” the US economy.
Among its proposals were to address how digital companies use network effects to crowd out potential competition, redefine and crack down on predatory pricing practices, apply tougher scrutiny to mergers that undermine competition within sectors, and enact new rules and procedures to speed antitrust litigation.
“Since many big technology companies have, to date, delivered lower-cost or even free services, they’ve escaped scrutiny even while violating consumer privacy and hindering competition,” the report concluded.