Platforms

For those of us who spent the last four years fighting a totally depressing battle against the last Administration’s nuclear attack on the public interest, springtime has brought the hope of rebirth, regeneration, and reform.   In media and telecom (my beat) we already see the budding of policies and programs to reverse the nation’s embarrassing broadband shortfalls.  Broadband is now seen as essential infrastructure, as important to twenty-first-century life as electricity was to the twentieth.  Not only that, but understanding broadband as a civil right seems to be taking hold.  Better la

Facebook was justified in banning then-President Donald Trump, the company’s independent oversight board ruled but didn’t appropriately explain if or why the former president should be permanently locked out of the social-media platform. “It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored,” the board said in its decision.

Facebook's newly formed Oversight Board—a group of 20 lawyers, professors and other independent experts who consider appeals to decisions made by the company—has been charged with interpreting Facebook’s numerous detailed rules governing everything from the depiction of graffiti to swearing at newsworthy figures.

The behaviors of platform and social media companies have evolved under the heat of the spotlight. Regulation takes time, and a lot of hearings, to produce tangible results. One upshot of four years of high-profile hearings is that tech companies now know how to play the game. Sometimes the goal isn't to pass a law. Congress uses the bully pulpit to force companies to self-regulate.

A Q&A with Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) about her new Antitrust book.

Q: You’ve talked a lot about big tech; when we talk about big tech, we almost always talk about the consumer companies at the edge. It feels like the internet providers, which are monopolies for most people, are not receiving this level of scrutiny. You used to be a telecom lawyer, you worked for MCI. Do you think that scrutiny is coming for the Comcasts and the AT&Ts and Spectrum Cables of the world as well?

Nearly every major social platform has recently introduced some form of tipping, allowing users to directly support their favorite personalities in real time. The popularity and availability of payment platforms such as Venmo, CashApp and Stripe are making it easier for tech companies to enable peer-to-peer payments on their platforms. For creators, getting money from users directly is critical because platforms are not financially incentivized to pay out most people directly.

The European Union unveiled strict regulations to govern the use of artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind policy that outlines how companies and governments can use a technology seen as one of the most significant, but ethically fraught, scientific breakthroughs in recent memory. The draft rules would set limits around the use of artificial intelligence in a range of activities, from self-driving cars to hiring decisions, bank lending, school enrollment selections, and the scoring of exams.

Around the world, governments are moving simultaneously to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before. Their motivation varies.