It is
clear more than ever that governments will no longer leave technology alone.
Europe mandated
standard phone chargers for portable electronics while Texas passed a contested
law to restrain social media companies’ policing of online speech. Tech
companies can count on more changes like those as government minders wade into
how they do business and how we use their products.
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That most likely
means new
technologies like driverless cars and facial recognition systems will
take longer to spread into the world than they might have. For many tech
proponents, more deliberation and oversight will slow invention. For others,
that is exactly the point.
It is easy to be
overwhelmed by (or tune out) all the attempted government regulation. In just
the past few weeks, journalists have written about pending congressional bills
involving data privacy and tech antitrust; the employment classification of
drivers for companies like
Uber; multiple countries setting standards about how
data can and cannot move around the globe; the Netherlands forcing
Apple to
revise payment options for dating apps; and two state laws on social media
speech.
Those are all the
result of a still-evolving rethinking of what had been a relatively
laissez-faire approach to tech since the 1990s. With exceptions, the prevailing
attitude was that new internet technologies, including digital advertising,
e-commerce, social media, and gig employment through apps, were too novel,
fringe, and useful for governments to constrain them with many rules.
As television and
radio did when those mediums were new, many tech companies encouraged light
regulation by saying that they were bringing change for the better, elected
officials were too plodding and clueless to effectively oversee them, and
government intervention would muck up progress.
Just one example:
A decade ago, Facebook said US rules that require TV and radio to disclose who
is paying for election-related ads should not apply to that company. The
Federal Election Commission “should not stand in the way of innovation.” a
Facebook lawyer said at the time.
Those ad
disclosures are not always effective, but after Russia-backed propagandists
spread social media ads and free posts to inflame American political divisions
in 2016, Facebook voluntarily started to provide more transparency about
political ads.
We realized that we unleashed these powerful forces and failed to create appropriate safeguards.
Better laws or ad
disclosures probably would not have prevented hostile foreign actors from
abusing Facebook to wage information wars in the US or other countries. But the
hands-off conventional wisdom most likely contributed to a sense that people in
charge of tech should be left alone to do what they wished.
That made it
harder for governments to wade in once it was clear that social media was being
abused to hurt democracy, that unproven driver-assistance technologies might be
dangerous, and that Americans have no control in the land grab for our digital
information.
“We realized that
we unleashed these powerful forces and failed to create appropriate
safeguards,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital
Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “We simply could have said in
the beginning, every technology needs to be regulated in a common-sense way.”
Now regulators are
feeling empowered. Lawmakers have waded in to make rules for law enforcement’s
use of facial recognition technology. There will be more laws like those in
Texas to take power away from the handful of tech executives who set rules of
free expression for billions of people. More countries will force Apple and
Google to remake the app economy. More regulation is already changing the ways
that children use technology.
Again, not all of
this will be good government intervention. But there are more signs that people
who create technologies want more government oversight, too — or at least pay
lip service to it. Any discussion about emerging technology — including
cryptocurrency and the artificial-intelligence illustration software Dall-E —
regularly includes deliberation about the potential harms and how regulation
might minimize them.
That does not mean
that people agree on what government oversight should look like. But the answer
is almost never no government intervention at all. And that’s different.
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