By Mackenzie Bryan
As big tech companies become increasingly intertwined with our private and public lives, there’s no agreement on how we should regulate them, say those who are trying to come up with ways to do it.
In a UC Santa Barbara online forum, Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech? four legal experts discussed this issue. Panelists came from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, as well as St. John’s University and at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, both in New York. The event, hosted by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the College of Letters and Science, was the 2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate.
“Big tech firms, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and a handful of similar companies are an enormous presence in all of our lives,” said Michael Burstein, the vice dean of Cardozo Law School, who moderated the debate. “As was said in the comic books, with great powers comes great responsibility. But it’s unclear how much these companies take responsibility for their effects in the world.”
The speakers focused on freedom of speech, privacy, and antitrust legislation. As each aspect was picked apart, panelists delved into whether or not big tech companies can regulate themselves or whether the government should have more control over them.
Sonia Katyal, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, said the rules that were developed to manage social media were based on laws governing freedom of speech and were created in a different era when people were oblivious to the potential harms of social media.
“When we think about how to regulate, I would recommend starting from that place, thinking about who is the most targeted and then figuring out ways to create a healthier space for social media,” Katyal said.
As for privacy, big tech companies collect data about individuals' private and public lives. In addition, they can take that information and sell it to advertisers relatively freely, the Zoom audience heard.
Kate Klonick, upper left, Michael J. Burstein, upper right, Sonia Katyal, lower left, and Randal C. Picker, lower right, in a virtual debate hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center about regulating powerful technology companies.
“I think what Sonia said about being sensitive to where you want to give information or where you want to keep it, I think that’s important,” said Picker, who is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Antitrust laws are based on regulating corporations with monopoly power. Burstein argued that companies with enough power can manipulate the market in their favor. “Specifically, it prevents companies with a monopoly from abusing that monopoly to keep out competitors or harm consumers,” he said.
Klonick of St. John’s University questioned whether antitrust legislation is enough. “How do you break up Facebook? What is it about Facebook that bothers you,” Klonick asked. “What bothers you is that it has a hive-mind to your entire life and that it’s in your feed and the product that it is delivering to you is this kind of see-all thing you cannot control. I want to get into the fact that this is not necessarily something that is well fixed by antitrust [laws].”
Burstein said that, ultimately, it comes down to how much trust one has in big tech companies. “That question is complicated in different sectors, with respect to different kinds of topics and different kinds of regulation to invoke,” Burstein said.
Mackenzie Bryan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication Studies and pursuing the Professional Writing Minor. She wrote this article for the Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.