Big Tech To Congress: Forget About Antitrust, Pass a Privacy Law (bloomberg.com) 54
Tech giants have a message for Congress: Stop pushing for antitrust laws, and pass privacy rules instead. Lobbying to stop a package of bills designed to curb internet giants' power reached a frenzy this week, as the window for major legislation before the midterms closes. A report notes: Two industry groups representing companies such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet held separate lobbying days to oppose the bills and promote a federal privacy law, among other industry goals. TechNet, one of the oldest tech interest groups, met virtually with 41 lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The group's president, Linda Moore, said TechNet argued that voters care more about addressing privacy issues than antitrust issues. "A lot of the interest around the competition bills is based on the collection and the use of data," Moore said. "Let's focus on that part." A federal privacy standard was proposed years ago, but has not been a focus for this Congress as lawmakers turned their attention to competition and content moderation issues. But as many states have passed their own privacy bills, companies and lawmakers have looked to codify a federal standard.
Here's an idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
No surprise (Score:3)
So, the big tech companies that are doing everything they can to be monopolies are lobbying hard to stop laws to prevent monopolies.
Is anybody surprised?
The fact that they're lobbying so hard is good evidence that it's needed.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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> They are required by law to do so.
That is a juvenile thought and wholly. incorrect. Shame on the mods. There is no criminal law nor civil law that will met punishment for failing to pursue monopolistic practices.
Re: (Score:2)
Not by law actually. By their IPO. Which in turn is enforceable by law.
Re:No surprise (Score:4)
That's a lazy interpretation of fiduciary duty and not at all what's required. Being responsible and having a good plan for long term stability is also in the interest of shareholders. Short-term profits or unrestrained growth are not required in order to fulfill any requirements to shareholders.
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Depends on the shareholder.
Your mom and pop? Certainly. Your pension or insurance company? Probably.
The gamblers who chafe at the table limits in casinos? Not likely.
So if your main investors, by volume, are hedge funds and other financiers of questionable ethics, "doing right by your investors" IS maximizing stock change, not even necessarily maximizing profit margins.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a breach of fiduciary duty if you believe you are doing what's in the best interest of the corporation and shareholders even if the shareholders are unhappy with what you do. What they want does not determine that.
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It's easy to say that if you don't mind being constantly on the other end of shareholder lawsuits.
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The gamblers who chafe at the table limits in casinos? Not likely.
Gamblers who chafe at the table limits in casinos are never shareholders. At least not at the same time, barring scizophrenia. Shareholders (along with casino owners) are exactly the vultures who LOVE table limits.
Table limits at casinos aren't representative at all of laws that need to be passed to protect people from greedy monopolistic corporations -- just the opposite. They're examples of the bad faith rules put in place by said monopolistic douchebags to prevent the possibility of the little guy benefi
Re: No surprise (Score:3)
Re: No surprise (Score:1)
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Honestly, the whole lobbying thing is bullshit to begin with. Basically, if somebody's willing to toss bribe money into the pot, you know damn good and well that their "requests" are either illegal, bad for the country, bad for the people, immoral or all of the above. What a joke.
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Both, yes, Both is good.
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Bothificationism? Blaspheme!
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Do both.
Exactly. Two things can be true. We need to fix both problems separately -they may overlap, but are not the same problem.
Lets enforce violations of the public trust: Anyone using their market power to the detriment of the public wellbeing. Great power = great responsibility... the larger and wealthier and more powerful the more responsibility to act for the public good. Enforced by the iron fist of the government (aka the will of the people). Allow the existing enforcement agencies to bring cases to
About time! (Score:2, Interesting)
20 years late!
Better late than never!
Amen to that!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
20 years late!
20 years of corruption.
Better late than never!
Says the one who's probably still paying for Too Big To Fail.
Amen to that!
Greed, is the one who put taxes on par with death. Prayer won't help you now.
forget about antitrust (Score:5, Insightful)
Says the companies that use anti-competitive practices to dominate their market.
My first thought when reading this was (Score:2)
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It's interesting that they are pushing for privacy laws though, after all the howls of pain and suffering due to GDPR.
My guess would be that they want to get ahead of any potential privacy restrictions, lobby like mad to make sure they right the rules, and then use them to put pressure on the EU to make GDPR compatible.
Might also be some regulatory capture going on. Both Apple and Google are implementing new privacy enhancements that favour companies that users give their data to voluntarily, i.e. themselve
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I'm at a US company but we have customers and employees all over the world. We spent some time training staff up and changing processes to comply with GDPR. Things are still chugging along as they always have. The initial pain is over and I doubt any new GDPR-like legislation in the US would be all that burdensome now.
Might also be some regulatory capture going on.
I think this is a big part of the effort. I've already seen instances of new business programs that revolved around GDPR compliance.
And using public support of privacy as a bargaining chip for
Re: forget about antitrust (Score:1)
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The Comics Code Authority (CCA) [wikipedia.org] was formed in 1954 by the Comics Magazine Association of America as an alternative to government regulation.
Motion Picture Production Code or "Hays" Code [wikipedia.org] was a self-regulation board created by the film industry to offer to state legislatures as an alternative to the hundreds of differing state decency laws that could block showing of films.
The Supreme Court has radically altered their views on the First Amendment throughout the 20th century, usually for the better. I think it
Re: forget about antitrust (Score:3)
Simpler explanation. Privacy laws benefit big companies that can afford compliance costs and disadvantage smaller competitors.
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The tougher privacy laws work in their favor, because Google or Facebook can afford the necessary lawyers and auditors to enforce them throughout their organization.
It just becomes an additional barrier of entry for new social media startups, who would now need to spend $,$$$,$$$ to be "Certified" for whatever new government privacy regulations the government comes up with. Bonus points if the EU and US come up with competing standards, requiring even more regulatory busy work to be done!
"Aww, don't wreck our budding technocracy!" (Score:2)
Re:"Aww, don't wreck our superminicomputers!" (Score:1)
Anti-vax is anti-LIFE
Copyright (c) 1984, Digital Equipment Corporation
Re: "Aww, don't wreck our superminicomputers!" (Score:1)
Re: "Aww, don't wreck our superminicomputers!" (Score:1)
Why not both? (Score:4, Insightful)
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes... [knowyourmeme.com]
The best time to break up a company (Score:2)
Is when they start begging for regulation. When they get to this stage they are no longer interested in competing they are only interested in controlling the market.
Political backlash (Score:4, Interesting)
The current focus on "reigning in the 'Tech Giants'" is not about anti-competitive practices or fake new or anything. It's about taking revenge against tech companies who fell into the trap of becoming content arbitrars and running afoul with political groups who are in bed with mainstream "news" companies that spread misinformation and lies.
Keep the focus on the "Tech Giants" and away from the "News" channels that openly lie and misinform and politically manipulate the populace.
This is payback for censoring political figures.
They shouldn't have fallen in the trap.
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Do both (Score:2)
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Good idea but the devils in the details. (Score:5, Insightful)
A strong federal law, modeled after the EU's, would be a good thing. However, a watered down one with less restrictions preempting state laws would be bad, and big tech has the money to push for such a law. A Federal law could say "no state make may a law prohibiting the collection of ... or requiring..." and effectively roll back protections. Companies pushing for Federal action usually has a goal that may be different than what it seems to accomplish.
If a big tech company complies with the most stringent requirements in each state law they can avoid trouble; and can afford lawyers to figure out what is compliant.
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Yes, absolutely, do model it after EU's privacy law. I simply can't express in mere words how much better my life is now that EU is protecting my privacy. I always dreamed of being forced to click "Yes, I agree to have my privacy raped" on a full-page content-hiding banner, on every webpage I visit, before I actually read anything. And before you go nitpicking, YES, there is also the button "No, I want to spend the next 10 minutes clicking through a settings page, disabling every tracker one-by-one". For some reason it's not popular, I wonder why. That's soo much better than just using adblock! THANK YOU, EU!
Most of teh sites I go to have a settings on teh landing page and a reject all button; once clik and done. No more cliks after that; and if taht's teh price to ay for EU privacy laws I am happy to pay it.
Normal Citizen to BIG TECH (Score:1)
That is all
Just ban all political figures from social media. (Score:2)
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Make it plain that this is NOT a free outlet for citizens to exercise free speech, it's an official function of the US Government
Creating a public forum owned by the government is absolutely a place where you'd have to allow the exercise of free speech.
And then you have a massively expensive taxpayer-funded moderation system on top of that. Where any wrongly moderated post could lead to a court case.
And who are you going to allow to create an account? Are you going to collect tracking information directly to enable 2FA and geofence it to US citizens?
Everything about what you're saying is worse than what we have. So why do it?
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And let's not forget that this would get handed off to the lowest bidder to create. When launched, it will crash daily and the costs to create the web site will somehow exceed $1 billion.
This is how democracy dies, (Score:2)
funded by big $$$.
BigTech wants the Privacy Law passed in Virginia (Score:3)
There is no private right of action for consumers. Instead, the Virginia Attorney General will have exclusive authority to enforce violations. Violators will have a 30-day period to cure infractions, after which the Attorney General can seek damages of up to $7,500 per violation.
That's it. It has no teeth because Amazon wrote it. This is what BigTech wants federally to supersede state laws.
Don't Break Us Up - Give Us Laws We Can Skirt By (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, if the tech companies get broken up, they have more competition and things actually have to change. But if Congress writes privacy laws (written by the lobbyists employed by the tech companies), the tech companies can continue business as usual.
Fuck privacy (Score:1)
What it really means (Score:2)
When "Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate" doesn't work, change the subject or move the goalposts.
What the corporation really means: We want to bribe one federal department, not 50 state departments. Also, it's much easier to implement one watered-down rule. When there are 50 rules covering one task, the corporation has to enforce the most restrictive (to itself) rule in every state.