Op-Ed

I worked with a fairly small group of early-stage internet policy wonks and helped create many of the basic rules that still govern the internet today. We missed a lot — a lot that turns out to have been important. 

I strongly oppose the idea of breaking up Facebook. I don’t believe Facebook is a monopoly. The way to keep social media truly competitive is to reinstate net neutrality. That would even the playing field and allow startups to compete on equal footing with giants like Facebook and Google. If internet service providers start charging for special privileges such as internet “fast lanes,” deep-pocketed companies would be able to squeeze out smaller competitors that can’t afford such costs.

In this anti-big tech moment, the slogan “break them up” is simple, catchy and has been adopted by some politicians and other observers to capture the emotion of the era. Unfortunately, “breaking up” large tech platforms is often not a good solution to the economic harms created by large firms in this sector. Washington cannot just break up big tech, or any company, solely because it is large or has a high market share.

In 2012, California decided to deregulate the broadband internet industry until 2020 with the aim of encouraging greater consumer choice, economic growth and innovation. Eight years later, these benefits have not materialized. Instead internet providers have taken advantage of deregulation to increase prices and evade oversight. Now internet providers are pushing Assembly Bill 1366, which would extend this disastrous policy for another decade.

We should view user data as a public resource, akin to the broadcast spectrum. The spectrum broadcasters use is “owned by the people.” It is governed so as to assure that the select few who have the privilege to access the spectrum serve the public interest. User data, in its aggregate form, can — and should — be treated similarly, as a public resource. Just as broadcasters built their businesses on the collectively owned spectrum, social media platforms built their businesses on our data, data that are best thought of as being collectively owned.

At last it’s happening—a growing national discussion about how America’s news and information “industry” is failing to nourish our civic dialogue. It should be something we expect the candidates to discuss—and take a stand on—as the 2020 election campaigns ramp up.

Given that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has fallen short of expectations, policymakers in other countries have an opportunity to do better, rather than repeat Europe’s mistakes. Five lessons to learn:

It’s time for the Federal Communications Commission to step into the future by using artificial intelligence tools to address the continuing lack of affordable broadband to many communities—an increasingly entrenched problem of “internet inequality,” which impacts our economy and democracy and threatens the future global competitiveness of our country. By adopting more sophisticated data validation algorithms, the FCC could avoid repeating past mistakes. Such algorithms can not only automate the data validation process but also can ensure consistency and learn from previous provider submiss

The Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census — at least, for now. This is a huge win for democracy: There is plenty of compelling research on why the citizenship question would depress response rates, particularly among immigrant, African American, and Hispanic groups.

A demolition team rolled in to 9 Broadcast Plaza in early June, tearing down Northern New Jersey’s only broadcast television studio.