A few months ago, there was a piece in the Financial Times titled, “Political Leaders Must Push Back Against Tech Bullies.” Written by Marietje Schaake, a director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, she pointed out that tech executives have “increasingly resorted to threatening officials and governments over democratically legitimate proposals that don’t suit their business models.” Her advice to political leaders was to get tough! Push back hard against threats made by “tech bullies” to withhold investments or pull out of markets. She warned government leaders that their “independence and authority” were at stake.
She’s right. In theory it’s important that democracies ensure that government controls business, not the other way around. Trouble is the problem is not in theory; it’s in practice. How is a top political leader supposed to manage a top tech company leader if the former has no idea what the latter is doing? No idea of how the cloud works. Hardly any idea of what a data center is or even an algorithm. Only a weak idea of what artificial intelligence can do today – and not the slightest conception of what AI will be capable of tomorrow.
No wonder that tech leaders have been bullying political leaders or trying to for years. In addition to their knowledge-power, tech leaders have money-power. Lots of it. Elon Musk’s financial support for the candidacy of former president Donald Trump was only the most visible recent example of the role that American tech titans now play in American politics, freely using their money in addition to their expertise to sway voters’ preferences and shape political outcomes.
Musk is also the most visible example of how easily America’s government can slide into dependency on America’s tech companies. Musk is the mastermind behind Starlink, a powerful satellite internet network. And he is the mastermind behind Space X, a powerful space technology company. Both companies already have their tentacles deep into the U. S. government, including the Defense Department.
Nowhere, though, is it written that public sector leaders must bow before their private sector counterparts. The European Union has long been ahead of the United States in using the law to set boundaries on behemoths such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, forcing them to comply with rules on, for example, data privacy and content regulation. Just recently the EU’s highest court went further than it did previously, dealing a major blow to Apple among others, forcing it to pay billions of dollars in unpaid back taxes. In France, a few months ago, the government even saw fit to arrest a leading tech executive, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, who is facing charges that include complicity in child exploitation.
Perhaps Europe’s jurists explain why America’s jurists are somewhat bolder now than before. In Pennsylvania, a federal court recently ruled that TikTok can potentially be held liable for harm caused by its algorithms. Similarly, a Federal District Court ruled that Google is illegally maintaining a monopoly over internet search. But so far – indicative of the complexity of a problem seeking a solution – the remedy to the monopoly remains elusive. Forcing the company to sell Chrome – Google’s very, very widely used internet browser – which recently was proposed by the Justice Department, could be a cure worse than the disease.
The issue of tech dominance and, therefore, the dominance of leaders of America’s most powerful and advanced tech companies, is so large it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. Just this month Australia became the first country in the world to ban the use of social media for those under the age of 16 – a significant step toward controlling a bad situation that up to now has been uncontrolled. Notwithstanding successes like these, challenges brought on by the new technologies are so many in number, and so complicated, that most mere mortals can barely understand them.
Last week, a little-known extreme right-winger scored a significant, shocking, success in a Romanian election. How did this ultranationalist catapult himself to center stage? He went viral on TikTok. After the fact, Romanian regulators requested that TikTok be suspended – they requested the barn door be shut after the horse got out.
It’s possible we’re at a tipping point. That leaders in the public sector will increasingly be emboldened to take on their private sector counterparts, specifically those at the top of America’s top tech companies. But count me a skeptic. Those who have drawn parallels between 20th century regulatory efforts and those we should and could see in the 21st, seem to me to imagine that the present resembles the past. But it does not. Regulating anyone or anything in the Internet Age – and now the age of AI – is not like regulating anyone or anything in the Gilded Age.
America’s Wild West tech landscape is one of the reasons why America’s tech industry has been exceptionally successful. Unfettered capitalism. But the problems associated with the lack of meaningful regulation are bad and they are getting worse. In large part this is because corporate leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella – and oh, yes, Mr. Musk – continue for the most part to roam freely.
Which still leaves open the question of whether leaders in government and jurisprudence will take on the tech bullies. Will the tail continue to wag the dog – or will the dog finally wag its tail?