"The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda. ...
There are five Internet companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars.
And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can."
The trouble for calling for regulation is that what you get is Theresa May's version.[1] Or the Great Firewall of China.
The trouble with not regulating is what we currently have, unfettered data collection and retention. There obviously need to be rules around all the digital gold these companies are amassing.
The Chinese and Theresa May want what currently the tech giants have which is unregulated access to data. Except instead of it being in the current sandboxes they want to build their own.
Both are equally incorrect and stem from unregulated data access and lack of rules around data aggregation and the ecosystems that the data props up.
How do we regulate in a way that limits the power of the big five without also hurting small businesses? Otherwise, the end result will almost certainly be to bolster Google and Facebook.
I honestly don't care if regulation that protects consumers ends up hurting small businesses.
Perhaps something else would also need to be done about Google and Facebook having too much power, but continuing to screw over everyone else to help small businesses isn't really on my personal radar.
By creating strong regulations to curb the worst practices of ad company tracking, then dismantling these monopolies the same way we did with Microsoft in the 90s.
I'm not at all confident that the Microsoft antitrust moves really did much to erode their dominance on the desktop -- rather, the desktop becoming less relevant has done that.
If anyone won from those actions, it was Google...
Talking about the great firewall, didn't Bono of all people praise it as a demonstration that filtering the net was possible? His statement was in the context of unlicensed copying (aka piracy).
And frankly if they want to deal with the rise of nationalism, they need to have a long hard look at the financial market and their destructive behavior.
What is needed is for the big finance houses to fall, and for the Euro zone to drop the whole austerity insanity.
Until then the left have no proper counterpoint to the rising nationalism, as said nationalism is largely feeding off anti-austerity, and thus anti-EU, opinions.