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It’s easy to feel hopeless about the collapse of the tech sector into a group 0f monopolistic silos that harvest and exploit our data, hold our communities hostage, gouge us on prices, and steal our wages.
But all over the world and across different government departments, policymakers are converging on a set of muscular, effective solutions to Big Tech dominance.
This convergence spans financial regulators and consumer protection agencies; it’s emerging in Europe, the USA, and the UK. It’s kind of a moment.
How Not To Fix Big Tech
To understand what’s new in Big Tech regulation, we should talk briefly about what’s old. For many years, policymakers have viewed the problems of Big Tech as tech problems, not big problems. From disinformation to harassment to copyright infringement, the go-to policy response of the past two decades has been to make tech platforms responsible for policing and controlling their users.
This approach starts from the assumption that the problems that occur after hundreds of millions or billions of people are locked inside of a platform’s walled garden are problems of mismanagement, not problems of scale. The thinking goes that the dictators of these platforms aren’t sufficiently benevolent or competent, and they must either be incentivized to do better or be replaced with more suitable autocrats.
This approach has consistently failed – gigantic companies have proved as unperfectable as they are ungovernable. What’s more, deputizing giant companies to police their users has the perverse effect of making them more[…]
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