Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?

Lax regulation has allowed the most powerful tech companies to become “pseudo-governments” imposing their will on the public, according to this impassioned broadside. Wheeler (From Gutenberg to Google), former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration, draws parallels between the Gilded Age and the present, noting that the income inequality and market concentration that characterize both eras were ameliorated in the 19th century by “antitrust law and regulatory oversight.” Advocating for the use of similar tools to curtail the power of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft, Wheeler warns that these companies have been implementing invasive data collecting and other problematic practices with few means for users to push back. Wheeler persuasively makes the case that tech CEOs can’t be trusted to regulate themselves, and while his policy recommendations are somewhat unspecific, they include putting into law the privacy principles outlined by Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, who encouraged establishing “privacy as the default setting,” and requiring “interoperability” (the ability to interface across independent platforms) to enhance competition (as a hypothetical example, Wheeler proposes a “social media platform for privacy-conscious users that would still be able to communicate with their friends on a different platform”). It’s a potent primer on the need to rein in big tech. (Oct.)