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Why Big Tech companies are like “digital nation states”
No government today has the toolbox to tinker with Big Tech – that's why it's time to start thinking of the biggest tech companies as bona fide "digital nation states" with their own foreign relations, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World. Never has a small group of companies held such an expansive influence over humanity. And in this vast new digital territory, governments have little idea what to do.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Big Tech: Global sovereignty, unintended consequences
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Facebook's terrible week proves tech policy changes are needed
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses trends in big tech, privacy protection and cyberspace:
Will the testimony of the whistleblower be a game changer?
Now it certainly was a down week for Facebook, which also faced a major outage and new accusations by Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who provided a trove of information first to the Wall Street Journal, and then gave testimony before US Congress. She reminded the world of how little transparency we really have into what Facebook does and how its business models create societal harms. But really after a week of outcry, we need more than that. Only clear policies will bring back the balance between the power of private companies like Facebook and independent oversight.
What policies are needed to tame the Facebook beast?
Well, in the US there has been a disproportionate focus on speech protections, which are of course key, but so is non-discrimination or antitrust. And the collection, brokering, sell, and use of data is crucial to the business models of social media giants. And with the US federal data governance law, that includes protections, but also foresees an access to data for researchers, the way that EU proposals do, a step in the right direction can be made. Only when we have a better sense of the effects of digital services, can we have a well-informed public debate and the appropriate public policies. So there are different parts of a legislative puzzle that have to come together. Unfortunately, no silver bullets. But hopefully the many harms that are now crystal clear, whether they involve children, democracy, or fair competition, can be solved with clear antitrust rules, privacy protections, data governance, and access provisions, which together will ensure greater accountability and democratic guarantees.
The Graphic Truth: Who uses Facebook products the most?
Chaos ensued globally this week when Facebook – and Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram – went dark. That's because the world's biggest social media platform now reaches more than 3.5 billion people a month. In many places around the globe, these apps are literally a lifeline: many small businesses rely on Facebook to sell their products, families use WhatsApp to keep in touch, and young people are hooked on Instagram. Indeed, if nothing else this week's turmoil reveals the massive extent to which Facebook Inc. influences people's lives — and livelihoods. We take a look at where these three platforms are used most around the world.
Is Facebook like a car or a cigarette?
It's been a rough week so far for Facebook. Accidentally cutting off 3.5 billion people from your services on day one, and then on day two watching a former employee describe in detail to Congress the many ways in which your product harms children and corrodes society generally: this is not good for a brand. But will it spur US lawmakers to beef up regulation of the tech giants?
There are two answers: probably no. and maybe yes.
Probably no. The outage, massive and unprecedented as it was, turned out to be a technical glitch. A horrible day for Facebook IT, to be sure, and it produced some epic Tech-on-Tech trolling, but will it really give fresh legs to calls to "break up Big Tech"? That feels less likely today than it did yesterday. For one thing, bad as the outage was, its main victims were small businesses who depend on Instagram and Facebook to reach customers. Yes, they lost a day's worth of orders, but they are a widely-dispersed constituency of relatively small-fry economic players. What's more, Facebook's size and reach is in many ways precisely what they've signed up for. For them the outage is largely an IT screwup, not an antitrust issue.
Second, with the exception of Facebook itself, the outage didn't pose a major problem for the operations of large, powerful corporations with lots of lobbying power. If we'd seen a similar outage at a cloud services provider — say, a Microsoft or an Amazon Web Services — whose servers hum for some of the world's richest and most influential companies, we might be having a very different conversation right now. In the end, the Great Facebook Outage of 2021 could well be remembered as an embarrassing blip rather than a regulatory watershed. So long as it doesn't happen again.
Maybe yes. The Tuesday morning Capitol Hill testimony by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen was an altogether more serious challenge for the company. Over the weekend, Haugen revealed herself as the person who in recent weeks had leaked to the Wall Street Journal a damning trove of internal documents showing that Facebook was keenly aware of the harm that its products inflict on children but had chosen to place "profits over people." Facebook's own executives went to Capitol Hill to deny this charge last week, but they've already suspended development of two kid-focused products on their Messenger and Instagram platforms.
A critical point of Haugen's remarks before the Senate subcommittee on Tuesday concerned the need to tackle harmful content, not by playing endless whack-a-mole with individual posts, but on regulating the algorithms that are tuned to maximize profit by serving up the most toxic and addictive content. If the Department of Transportation has insight into the safety of our cars, she asked — why shouldn't the government have similar power over the safety of our algorithms?
Moves by lawmakers on that front would mark a significant step in tech regulation. Could there be bipartisan movement in that direction? Republican Senator John Thune has already sponsored bills to regulate algorithms, while his Democratic colleague Richard Blumenthal, who chaired the subcommittee hearing, pronounced it a "Big Tobacco moment" for Big Tech, invoking the regulatory kneecapping of the cigarette industry over the past 20 years.
Other near-term measures could include a strengthening of child privacy protections for social media. Facebook itself seems resigned to the likelihood of new rules: while the company cast doubts on Haugen's expertise, it did say it is "time for Congress to act" to create clearer rules of the road for the internet. (Naturally, Big Tech will seek to influence the writing of those rules, of course.)
But how far will any new bipartisan bonhomie on regulating Silicon Valley go? The need to protect kids is something most agree on, but there are still big divides between Republicans and Democrats about broader issues of "Big Tech regulation". Democrats tend to focus on the need to police misinformation, squelch hate speech, and — particularly among progressive lawmakers — curb the market power of Big Tech players. Republicans, meanwhile, have focused chiefly on Silicon Valley's perceived liberal bias and stifling of free speech.
Comments section. Haugen's testimony has concentrated lawmakers' minds, but it's unclear how far any new regulatory push will go. Big Tech has big problems, but lots of users and deep, deep pockets.
China agitating Taiwan to demonstrate power, not start WWIII
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week with a look at Chinese warplanes, the Pandora Papers, and Facebook's major outage.
What is China signaling by sending warplanes into Taiwan's air defense identification zone?
Well, it's not their airspace. They've done this before. They do it a lot. In fact, on some days, a year ago, in the past, they've had over 20 incursions on a day. Over the last few days, it has been record levels, so clearly, they're agitated. They want to show that they're strong and assertive. Having said that, we are not on the brink of World War III. There is a greater chance of accidents happening, and that would be a really bad thing, but on balance, this doesn't cross any red lines between the two countries. I think the headlines are a little breathless on it.
What are the Pandora Papers?
It is yet one more, even larger dump of information about a whole bunch of former and standing world leaders and the wealthy people near them who are trying to obscure their wealth, frequently ill-gotten, through offshore accounts and usually buying a bunch of real estate in other countries. Some leaders that are trying to show themselves as reformers are going to get caught up and really embarrassed by that. In particular, some of the ministers around Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, President Lasso in Ecuador. There are, I would say King Abdullah in Jordan, certainly, but for people like Putin, of course, complete impunity, no shame, because they have thorough control of their system, their media. It's an authoritarian state, full on.
What's happening with Facebook?
Well, it looks like it was an own goal, of big engineering mistake. The fact that you can take half of the planet down in terms of an app that they use, so easily, it's a lot more dangerous than, say, just-in-time supply chain and what we learned about not having redundancy and resilience in our system after the pandemic. This, on the digital side, even more dangerous. Imagine if it had been something where companies use it fundamentally to work, like for example Amazon or Microsoft. I mean, this was a significant inconvenience, most importantly for small enterprises that use Facebook for their businesses. Six hours down. Big embarrassment for Facebook. Question is whether or not it makes any of us think differently about the need for redundancy and resilience on digital sites. They are so, of course, concentrated. We'll see what happens on the regulatory side. So far, there's been very little.
Facebook — OFF
Has a single tech malfunction ever affected quite as many people as this? You do the math, but on Monday an unexplained outage at Facebook left some 3.5 billion users worldwide without access to the social media site, its messaging app WhatsApp, and the photo sharing site Instagram.
Imagine all those IG influencers with nothing to do for seven entire hours! No filter indeed. But more seriously, millions of small businesses around the world that rely on Facebook and Instagram for marketing and sales were left high and dry, as were hundreds of millions of people who use WhatsApp as their primary means of social and professional communication.
What timing! The mega-glitch occurred, coincidentally, the day after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen blasted the company for hiding evidence that it systematically chooses profits over safety when it comes to dealing with hate speech, incitement, and misinformation.
What caused the outage? Despite a whirlwind of juicy theories about a potential inside job or external hack, Facebook said late Monday that the cause was human error: intentional servicing of the social media giant's servers went wrong in a freak way that cascaded across its networks, bringing the whole thing down in a matter of minutes. Bad day for the Facebook IT department, to say the least.
But a big political question looms: The episode will stoke fresh debate on Capitol Hill about whether social media companies should in fact be broken up or regulated more closely. When a single glitch affects the lives and livelihoods of nearly half the world's population at one go, that's a sign either of a company that is too powerful to be left to its own (glitchy) devices or, by contrast, too big to fail.
Expect this question to heat up even further as Haugen, the whistleblower, gets set to testify before Congress... today.