Photo by Ümit Yıldırım on Unsplash
- To Take Down Big Tech, They First Need to Reinvent the Law
For decades, antitrust regulation has been overwhelmingly focused on the welfare of the consumer. No cost to the consumer, no problem. That opened the door for Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — which offered digital services that were cheap or free — to become immensely profitable and powerful.
Now a backlash is mounting as renegade scholars try to reverse years of established doctrine that they say does not appropriately take the clout of those companies into account. Economic absolutism is making way for other considerations as antitrust goes back to its roots.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/technology/tech-giants-antitrust-law.html
- GDPR Has Been a Boon for Google and Facebook
The rules have also made it harder for third parties to collect lucrative personal information like location data in Europe to target ads. This gives the tech giants another advantage: They have direct relationships with consumers that use their products, allowing them to ask for consent directly from a much larger pool of individuals.
“GDPR has tended to hand power to the big platforms because they have the ability to collect and process the data,” says Mark Read, CEO of advertising giant WPP PLC. It has “entrenched the interests of the incumbent, and made it harder for smaller ad-tech companies, who ironically tend to be European.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gdpr-has-been-a-boon-for-google-and-facebook-11560789219
- Why a great education means engaging with controversy
- How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood
In his initial bill, then-Rep. Markey said a child was someone under 16. But there was pushback from e-commerce companies about cutting off their access to this lucrative market. Those companies found an unlikely ally in civil liberties groups.
The fear: Requiring teens to obtain parental permission might curtail their ability to access information about birth control and abortion, or resources for getting help in abusive situations, according to Kathryn Montgomery, who ran the Center for Media Education, the group that had nudged the FTC to investigate kids’ sites in the first place. “I agreed that those were concerns,” she said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-13-became-the-internets-age-of-adulthood-11560850201