Platforms

Tech has been given surprisingly little airtime during the 2020 Democratic primaries. It has rarely come up on the debate stage. While candidates such as Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Andrew Yang, and Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) have made tech-related issues part of their platforms, the matter is often eclipsed by other political hot topics, including health care and taxes.

A new movement toward public service digital media may be what we need to counter the excesses and failures of today’s internet. A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

The Trump campaign lashed out at Facebook after company executives said they were considering changes to rules around political ads that could affect the campaign’s ability to target its supporters on the platform. The outcry came as Trump’s reelection team has undertaken a massive spending blitz on Facebook aimed at countering the House’s impeachment inquiry. Trump’s page alone promoted more than $830,000 worth of ads in the seven days ending on Nov 17, according to Facebook’s ad archive.

Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple defended their business practices in responses to detailed questions by House Antitrust Subcommittee lawmakers. The four companies received the questions from Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) in Sept. Separately, the whole committee issued requests for extensive records on the firms’ business practices, acquisitions, executive communications and other issues. The companies also are in the process of responding to those requests.

Twitter will no longer allow certain types of geographic or keyword targeting for advertisers promoting any type of cause, as part of rules aimed at blocking most political-related ads on its platform. Geotargeting isn’t allowed at the ZIP Code level nor are advertisers allowed to target users by their political leanings or affiliations, as part of efforts to limit issues-based advertising. Twitter defines issues-based ads as those related to civic engagement, economic growth, environmental stewardship or social-equity causes.

Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged. Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation. Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

The House Small Business Committee took its turn at running Big Tech through another Hill gauntlet at a hearing titled "A Fair Playing Field? Investigating Big Tech’s Impact on Small Business." Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) started the hearing by praising Amazon and Google for agreeing to send witnesses, and pointing to the two empty chairs for no-shows Facebook and Apple.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee heard from two major players in the government's review of Big Tech and whether the antitrust laws have kept up with their exponential growth, but not before the legislators had staked out their own positions. Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) pulled no punches, saying that the extreme concentration of online platforms may have some benefits, but they were clearly using their power to set market terms that enrich themselves and make it impossible to compete. He also commented on Google and Fitbit.

Since the time of the early advertising-supported newspapers, economic incentive has worked to bring people together around a common set of shared information. Maximizing ad revenue meant offending as few readers as possible by at least attempting a balanced presentation of the facts. The search for balance began to retreat with the arrival of cable television, but the economic model of maximizing revenue by maximizing reach still governed. The targeting capability of social media algorithms, however, has extinguished the traditional economic model.

Thousands of local newspapers have closed in recent years. Their disappearance has left millions of Americans without a vital source of local news and deprived communities of an institution essential for exposing wrongdoing and encouraging civic engagement.