Congress hauled the CEO's of Google, Apple, Facebook, and a couple of others up in front of a Congressional committee today. Questioning ran from hard to hostile. Republicans accuse them of censoring conservative posts and advertisements. Some Congresscritters want to regulate them. I doubt that will work. The only people who really know what the sites will do are the software guys who write the code. Those people all work for the company management and will conceal anything that management wants concealed, and keep on doing in secret things the regulators want stopped, like gathering user data and selling it. I don't see how any government regulators could ever understand what was happening and control what is going down. Those regulators will come to work, put in 8 hours a day, draw their pay, and put out press releases telling how great they are doing, but they won't actually control anything important.
More effective would be to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust act to break the big boys up into smaller pieces, like they did to Standard Oil better than 100 years ago. The new pieces would have to compete with each other for users and advertisers. If users and advertisers want a platform that does not censor them and does not sell their data to other advertisers, such a platform will emerge, rapidly.
No comments:
Post a Comment