Platforms

Apple’s mobile apps routinely appear first in search results ahead of competitors in its App Store, a powerful advantage that skirts some of the company’s rules on such rankings. The company’s apps ranked first in more than 60% of basic searches, such as for “maps,” the analysis showed. Apple apps that generate revenue through subscriptions or sales, like Music or Books, showed up first in 95% of searches related to those apps. This dominance gives the company an upper hand in a marketplace that generates $50 billion in annual spending.

Facebook and Amazon both set quarterly records for federal lobbying over the last three months, leading a pack of large tech companies that are increasingly under siege in Washington. Each company spent a little more than $4 million on lobbying in the second quarter, the first time either firm has spent that much on their influence operations in the capital. Google, which has also seen its fortunes change in Washington, spent just $2.9 million in the second quarter — the least it’s spent on lobbying since 2011.

The package of penalties for Facebook’s past privacy scandals includes a record-breaking $5 billion fine and unprecedented government oversight of its business practices. But a review of the 16-month investigation — described by 10 people familiar with the matter — shows that the Federal Trade Commission stopped short of some even tougher punishments it initially had in mind. Those included fining Facebook not just $5 billion, but tens of billions of dollars, and imposing more direct liability for the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission has finalized a settlement with Google in its investigation into YouTube for violating federal data privacy laws for children. The settlement — backed by the agency’s three Republicans and opposed by its two Democrats — finds that Google inadequately protected kids who used its video-streaming service and improperly collected their data in breach of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which prohibits the tracking and targeting of users younger than 13, the people said.

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.

For all the promise of digital technologies to promote religious freedom, there are also very real downsides. When it comes to harnessing digital tools to punish religious minorities, the biggest offender is the world’s most populous country: China. China employs significantly more people to violate the rights of their citizens than the United States employs to militarily defend rights like free expression and freedom of assembly. 

The House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee grilled executives from Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google in a hearing as part of their wide-ranging investigation into big tech companies and the threats they may pose to competition.

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reintroduced the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act, a bill to require disclosure of information concerning online social media bots. The Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to enforce transparency requirements on social media companies regarding the use of social media bots that replicate human activity online.

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.

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.