The US Government is finally moving at the speed of Technology

Summer 2017, my boss Washington MonthlyA DC-based magazine asked me to tell a bomb story: If the Democratic Party had including the anti-monopoly section on its “Better Deal” agenda in mid-2018.

I use the term “bomb” ironically. The Monthly he has been publishing harsh stories about lax enforcement tolls against the monopoly for a decade, with great uproar. Now, in the end, the people in power were paying attention. For the general public, some general statements about the economic concentration of a document that hardly anyone paid attention to did not have an important story. But in our corner of the world of politics, in 2017, it was a great thing to hear Chuck Schumer say the word. ”antitrust“. My piece went on the cover.

I’ve been thinking about that experience lately, as antitrust titles seem to be everywhere. Yes often suggest that law and government can never keep up with the pace of technology. And yet, the events of recent weeks suggest that recent efforts to regulate the largest technology companies may be an exception to that rule. Amazon Prime didn’t exist until 2005, 11 years after Amazon was founded, and didn’t even get 20 million subscribers Until 2013. Google was 10 years old when it launched the Chrome browser. Facebook was eight years old when it bought Instagram and when it bought 10 WhatsApp.

Now consider the antitrust. Four years ago, Lina Khan was out of Law School for a month, where she published Pioneer Article arguing that the legal doctrine in force allowed Amazon to flee with anti-competitive behavior. The antitrust law was not yet a well-known issue, and Khan suggested that the offer of consumers was free or very cheap to apply to technology companies in the opinion of many legal establishments. This week, Khan was 32 years old named Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the two agencies with the greatest power to enforce competition law. Meanwhile, Congress has introduced a set of bills that represent the biggest bipartisan proposals to update the antitrust law over the decades, with the technology industry as an explicit goal. In other words, politics is moving at the speed of technology.

In retrospect, the most notable thing on the Better Deal agenda is that it doesn’t mention tech companies at all. Until then, the anti-monopoly movement in DC policy circles was much more focused on traditional industries. He started writing about consolidation in businesses like Khan meat packaging and Halloween candy. Silicon Valley still seemed politically intangible. Taking a liking to Facebook and Google, I wrote at the time, “It would demand the anger of some of the most important donors and deep pockets of Democrats, because the party has not yet shown a desire.”

How did things change so quickly? No one is smoking a gun, but rather the accumulation of complaints against technology companies that became more and more Democrats and Republicans. A key factor for Democrats was the sense that social media platforms, regardless of the political leanings of the founders, helped Donald Trump be elected. Cambridge Analytica scandals on Facebook In 2018 he overloaded those suspicions. Research reports, meanwhile, showed that far-right and racist material was spreading on social media. At the same time, and in part as a reaction to the establishment of more aggressive content moderation in front of social media platforms to alleviate advertisers and liberal critics, conservatives were increasingly concerned that liberals in Silicon Valley were discriminating. Republican politicians political power talking about that point.