Big tech finally faces regulation: it won’t be easy

The signs are that we’re approaching the moment when the big technology companies will face the enormous challenge of being put under some kind of regulation in their country of origin, the United States, which will affect their plans in other countries. With the exception of Microsoft, which first clashed with the regulatory authorities almost 20 years ago and now seems to have been let on the sidelines of the impending battle, the tech giants are now under scrutiny, and many aspects of their business are going to be affected.

What’s behind this desire by the authorities to bring them under control? First, the evidence that these companies have turned out to be frighteningly poor at self-regulation. One after another, the tech giants have displayed wanton irresponsibility, putting their users or their competitors at risk, breaching some of most foundational aspects of society such as privacy and even democracy itself.

What is coming to these companies now is an imminent action, not partisan, and executed at the highest level: the public prosecutors of several states, both Republican and Democrat, have begun investigations into these companies. In the spotlight are issues such as the management of their platforms and their competition strategies: how Apple manipulates its App Store to position its applications over others, exercising omnipotent control, how Google does the same with its search results to progressively monopolize web traffic, how Facebook has acquired any possible competitor and allowed its platform to be grossly misused, and how Amazon created hundreds of its own brands of all kinds of products and positioned them above those of the companies trying to sell on its online store.

How will the authorities go about implementing an enormously complex regulatory process? We’re talking about reconstructing a regulatory landscape that Robert Bork destroyed during the Reagan administration, neutralizing antitrust legislation and effectively creating an anything-goes environment that has led us to where we are now. Measures will be required to separate the management of the platforms from the interests of their owners, possibly tpo force them to roll back certain acquisitions; we’ll need new control and supervision mechanisms, along with new taxes and legislation to fix the present loopholes, and even forcing companies to share data or to make public some of its key algorithms. We’re talking about rewriting the rules of the game for the data economy, rules that until now had been written by the tech giants, and that has been taking us into an increasingly unsustainable situation.

Is regulation a silver bullet? No. Historically, the capacity and ability of regulators has been clumsy and limited, and US politicians have already amply demonstrated that, with a few honorable exceptions, they lack the knowledge necessary to regulate a sector they do not understand. Where will this regulatory process take us? It is hard to know. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to regulate an area that is now dangerously out of control.

(En espa?ol, aquí)