Weinstein: Democracy is losing its race with disruptionĪs tech platforms have come under growing scrutiny in recent years for their alleged antitrust violations, their data surveillance, and even their potential role in the deteriorating mental health of teenage girls, the Big Five have achieved the remarkable feat of antagonizing influential lawmakers in both major political parties. But the reality that the tech giants have long been entwined with government policy somehow got lost in the age of “Move fast and break things”-a mantra that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg coined more than a decade ago-and public officials are only now returning to the question of how best to regulate the biggest platforms. The advent of smartphones, one-click shopping, and an avalanche of digital stimuli doesn’t change the fact that, when any industry stands astride the economy and reaches into most Americans’ homes, lawmakers should assess whether the public interest is being protected. Microsoft was the beneficiary of antitrust litigation aimed at IBM, once the country’s dominant computer maker Amazon, Google, and Facebook have flourished because a 1996 law granted them extraordinary protection from legal liability for the content they circulate Apple is a beneficiary of a strong patent regime. In reality, one of the most important things the United States government has ever done to advance technology is regulate it. Long before Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft began spending millions of dollars to fight antitrust rules and other measures that would challenge their business models, 20th-century behemoths such as AT&T and IBM were insisting that government interventions in their business would stifle innovation. Today’s Big Five digital platforms aren’t the first tech giants to bristle at government scrutiny.
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