It was an intense three hours. During that time, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen gave details to the United States Congress about the social media giant’s contested practices to maximize engagement on its platforms. “Senior executives know how to make Facebook and Instagram more secure, but they do not make changes because they put their immense benefits above the people,” he ruled in early October after providing thousands of internal documents as evidence. The leak has become one of the biggest blows to the company that Mark Zuckerberg founded in 2004 and has reignited the debate about how to control Big Tech, which has amassed unprecedented economic power and social influence. The dilemma of how to do it has been hanging over regulators’ offices in both the United States and Europe for years. And there is, at least for the moment, no easy solution in sight.
The possibility of chopping up these giants – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple billed between five a billion dollars last year – has been on the table since former Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren promised to do so if she won the elections in 2020. But he did not make it to the White House, and this option has been losing steam in Washington. For what there is consensus between Republicans and Democrats is to review the Communications Decency Act, which guarantees immunity to digital platforms from possible lawsuits for the content they disseminate. “Social networks are currently the largest source of anti-vaccine rants and misinformation about health,” warns Michael Cusumano, professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Companies are reluctant to touch content a lot because that can make them a kind of publisher instead of neutral platforms, which can affect the protection that the law gives them,” he explains.
The North American political class also agrees on the need for greater regulation, such as enforcing privacy requirements and special protection for children. The problem is defining the details. “Democrats and Republicans agree that the power of Big Tech needs to be limited. What ends up coming out will have to be seen, but surely the regulation will be touched ”, underlines Sheera Frenkel, journalist from The New York Times and co-author of the book Manipulado, in which the last and convulsive years of the social network are narrated. “Never has so much effort been put into Washington as now to dismantle Facebook,” he says.
Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House last January precipitated a series of key appointments that pave the way for more-than-usual interventionism by institutions. Among them, that of the academic Lina Khan, who became known for an article published in 2017 in which she argued how to apply antitrust rules against Amazon, as one of the five people who sit on the board of the Federal Trade Commission. (FTC, in English), which from that moment had a Democratic majority.
In the case of Facebook, Professors Tim Wu, appointed by Biden as a competing White House Office adviser, and Scott Hemphill, saw the integration of Instagram and WhatsApp as a ploy to circumvent antitrust action. Zuckerberg could argue that dissociating his social networks was no longer possible, just as it is not possible to separate the eggs from an omelette when it is already made. For Wu and Hemphill, nothing different from what Standard Oil did at the time, which forged its monopoly with the acquisition of more than 40 companies. In 2019, Facebook was already 70.
Is it unreasonable to think that a company as consolidated and large as Meta, or the rest of the large ones, will be cut apart? Or, failing that, that measures are applied to fragment their business? There are precedents for this, even in the technology sector itself. Microsoft dominated in the 1990s the market for operating systems and hardware. When the internet became popular, he decided to bundle his browser, Explorer, which gave him an enviable position in control of the market. That domain shot the case against them. “The harm to the consumer, which is the yardstick that the FTC has to apply the law antitrust, is articulated in three pillars: price, quality and innovation. And for Microsoft, as now for large technology companies, the price part is easy because it is free, ”says Marelisa Blanco, from the Akme law firm. “However, the authorities decided in the end that there was an abuse of market power by favoring their products and preventing the entry of new competitors.”
Attempts to limit big tech are also proving difficult in the EU. A year ago the European Commission announced a package to regulate the sector, but it has not yet been approved by the European Parliament. These are the Law on Digital Services, which establishes the responsibility of platforms in the event that illegal content is published, and the Law on Digital Markets, designed to facilitate free competition on platforms.
The large amount of money that big technology spends on lobbies it shows how well aware they are of the danger to their business if the regulators get tough. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple spent more than 19 million euros on it in 2019, as declared in the EU transparency register and collected by Integrity Watch. That amount is double that invested by the seven major car manufacturers in Europe.
While waiting for possible new regulations, there has already been a hit. Google has the dubious honor of having received the largest fine ever imposed on a technology company: 4.34 billion euros. The sanction, imposed by the Commission in 2018 when it considered that Alphabet used its Android operating system to limit competition from its rivals in the mobile phone market, was appealed by the company before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) . Another of the big tech under scrutiny from Brussels is Amazon. The Commission’s vice president, Margrethe Vestager, announced late last year that the Competition department had opened a new investigation against the company that Jeff Bezos founded for business practices linked to its program. premium that could constitute an abuse of its dominant position in the market.
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