Executives from Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet’s Google will testify before a House of Representatives congressional committee next week in a hearing to discuss the tremendous market power wielded by online platforms.
In a statement on Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee said witnesses would include: Adam Cohen, director of economic policy at Google; Nate Sutton, associate general counsel for regulation at Amazon; Facebook’s Matt Perault, head of global policy development and Apple vice president for corporate law Kyle Andeer.
There is a lot of concern about the power these platforms have, and with good reason. I’m not convinced that the government, any government, has the wherewithal to actually understand the technology that has ultimately raised these concerns though—that creates an even bigger problem. Of all the companies called to testify, it seems that Apple is in the safest position, partly because of its stance on security and privacy, and they don’t have the social networking platform that the others have.
Our government does not rely upon its legislators to have encyclopedic knowledge of everything that comes under its purview. That’s unrealistic. Staffers are there to conduct and compile research to present in order for the legislator to understand and develop policy. However, that understanding is mitigated and undermined by corporate lobbying.
The fact that there is so little regulation is part of the huge problem in tech right now, so who else but the government will develop them? Now, whether those regulations are sensible and appropriate is a different matter, but something needs to be done and it’s literally the government’s job to do it.
Governments don’t understand technology, or understand anything. Only individuals can “understand.” When governments make stupid policies, or choose poorly, that isn’t necessarily because those making the policies or choices “don’t understand” it is just that they are doing so with different intent.
Feigning interest in solving perceived problems in an effort to retain political control is foreseeable. It seems likely individuals in government understand this all too well – and thus thoroughly “understand technology.”
Encyclopedic knowledge was never expected, but curiosity and a focus on genuine public service was.
The U.S. Congress used to have nonpartisan offices (like the Office of Technology Assessment—dismantled when Republicans took over Congress in 1994) that would provide resources and needed analysis for representatives and their staffs to more effectively understand the issues they were being presented with.
As you said, lobbyists now provide all the “information” that any business-first-devotee congressperson could ever want.