Knowledge Gap Hinders Ability of Congress to Regulate Silicon Valley

With bipartisan agreement, members of Congress said that Silicon Valley needed to be reined in with new regulations. But time and again, when the most pressing issues have landed on Capitol Hill — like gun violence, school shootings, immigration and border control — Congress has declared five-alarm fires only to fail to follow through on major legislation. The current zest for new privacy laws is also likely to stall as lawmakers wrestle with the technical complexities and constitutional vexations sure to emerge with any legislation to control content on the internet. Beyond the typical political gridlock that has stymied action in Congress, technology and the companies that sell access to it are particularly protected. The Facebook hearings revealed a vast knowledge gap between Silicon Valley and the nation’s capital, where lawmakers struggled to grasp how the technology works and which problems — misinformation, sharing of data to third parties or political biases coded into algorithms — needed to be addressed. Inaction does not reflect a lack of will so much as a failure of expertise.