Why Won’t the U.S. Take On Big Tech?

U.S. regulators watched in silence as Elon Musk unveiled plans to buy Twitter this week – the billionaire has said that he wants to make it more friendly to “free speech.” The move was just the most recent high-profile example of the chaos reigning in the American tech industry.

Meanwhile, last week European Union lawmakers passed the second part of sweeping legislation designed to dramatically curtail the powers of Big Tech and stop giant companies from sucking up or crushing competitors. It’s expected to be in effect by the end of the year.

The difference between American and European regulation couldn’t be more stark.

While tech companies now spend more than any other industry on lobbying in the EU – more than 29.5 million euros [$31 million] between October 2020 and September 2021 – their efforts haven’t exactly borne fruit.

Under the proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), tech giants would be prevented from harvesting data from across different platforms (like Meta plucking info from WhatsApp and Instagram) for use in targeted ads. Furthermore, these “gatekeeper” companies would no longer be allowed to make their own products the default option when a customer is setting up hardware and would have to ensure “interoperability” across apps – meaning that if you’re sending somebody a text through iMessage, they should be able to receive it through WhatsApp or Signal.

This comes alongside the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA), which EU lawmakers passed earlier this year. The law makes these same companies accountable for disinformation and illegal content published on their platforms. Under the DSA, tech companies are prohibited from ads targeting kids and ads targeting users based on their ethnicity, are obligated to make their algorithms more transparent, and are responsible for hate speech and illegal wares sold on e-commerce platforms.

Unlike previous efforts to control tech companies, this new legislation comes with big penalties for violators: fines from 10 to 20 percent of a company’s global revenue and possible expulsion from the EU market.

These acts come in the wake of the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives consumers the right to see the data that online businesses collect about them, and governs how businesses use that information. Despite corporate concerns, the sky did not fall after that legislation was implemented.

These three pieces of legislation stand to make Europe the global leader in regulating tech.

European lawmakers are also considering the Artificial Intelligence Act, which would outlaw social scoring algorithms and would make it illegal for companies to use AI to filter and rank job applicants.

The U.S., on the other hand, has done absolutely nothing to govern Big Tech. No one has been able to penetrate the force field of money and lobbying power that tech companies have set up in Washington.

As a reminder about why tech is in need of some oversight, consider the following: The biggest tech companies have been credibly accused of eroding the institutions of democracy, facilitating genocides, deliberating ignoring child abuse being arranged through their platforms, destroying journalism, driving down wages to unlivable levels, evading all manner of federal regulation, selling dangerous products, harvesting private consumer data, and generally making us all dumber. But at least we have crypto.

All this is grim, but there are some glimmers of hope in the U.S.: A number of antitrust cases against tech companies are gaining momentum, and Biden’s appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, chairperson Lina Khan, is an outspoken critic of Big Tech. There’s also the possibility that once tech companies are forced to comply with the new EU rules, they’ll adopt whatever changes they make globally.

Whatever happens, there’s one argument that doesn’t hold water anymore: that regulating tech can’t be done.