EU agrees deal to tame internet 'Wild West'
AFP - Yesterday
The European Union early Saturday finalised new legislation to require Big Tech to remove harmful content, the bloc's latest move to rein in the world's online giants.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) -- the second part of a massive project to regulate tech companies -- aims to ensure tougher consequences for platforms and websites that host a long list of banned content ranging from hate speech to disinformation and child sexual abuse images.
EU officials and parliamentarians finally reached agreement at talks in Brussels early Saturday on the legislation, which has been in the works since 2020.
"Yes, we have a deal!," European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton tweeted.
"With the DSA, the time of big online platforms behaving like they are 'too big to care' is coming to an end. A major milestone for EU citizens," said Breton, who has previously described the internet as the "Wild West".
"Today's agreement on DSA is historic," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen tweeted.
"Our new rules will protect users online, ensure freedom of expression and opportunities for businesses. What is illegal offline will effectively be illegal online in the EU."
The regulation is the companion to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which targeted anti-competitive practices among tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook and was concluded in late March.
The legislation had faced lobbying from the tech companies and intense debate over the extent of freedom of speech.
Tech giants have been repeatedly called out for failing to police their platforms -- a New Zealand terrorist attack that was live-streamed on Facebook in 2019 caused global outrage, and the chaotic insurrection in the US last year was promoted online.
The dark side of the internet also includes e-commerce platforms filled with counterfeit or defective products.
- Obligations for large platforms -
The regulation will require platforms to swiftly remove illegal content as soon as they are aware of its existence. Social networks would have to suspend users who frequently breach the law.
The DSA will force e-commerce sites to verify the identity of suppliers before proposing their products.
While many of the DSA's stipulations cover all companies, it lays out special obligations for "very large platforms", defined as those with more than 45 million active users in the European Union.
The list of companies has not yet been released but will include giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Twitter and probably the likes of TikTok, Zalando and Booking.com.
These players will be obliged to assess the risks associated with the use of their services and remove illegal content.
They will also be required to be more transparent about their data and algorithms.
The European Commission will oversee yearly audits and be able to impose fines of up to six percent of their annual sales for repeated infringements.
Among the practices expected to be outlawed is the use of data on religion or political views for targeted advertising.
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen caused a huge stir last year when she accused her former bosses of prioritising profits over the welfare of users.
She hailed in November the "enormous potential" of the European regulation project, which could become a "reference" for other countries, including the United States.
However, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) fears the text does not go far enough.
It wants a ban on all advertising based on the surveillance of internet users, and random checks on online vendors' products.
aro/mad/lth/mtp/leg
E.U. Takes Aim at Social Media’s Harms With Landmark New Law
The Digital Services Act would force Meta, Google and others to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads. How European officials will wield it remains to be seen.
April 22, 2022
The European Union was nearing a deal on Friday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of dollars in fines. Tech companies would be compelled to set up new policies and procedures to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other material defined as illegal by countries within the European Union.
The law aims to end an era of self-regulation in which tech companies set their own policies about what content could stay up or be taken down. It stands out from other regulatory attempts by addressing online speech, an area that is largely off limits in the United States because of First Amendment protections. Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, would face yearly audits for “systemic risks” linked to their businesses, while Amazon would confront new rules to stop the sale of illegal products.
The Digital Services Act is part of a one-two punch by the European Union to address the societal and economic effects of the tech giants. Last month, the 27-nation bloc agreed to a different sweeping law, the Digital Markets Act, to counter what regulators see as anticompetitive behavior by the biggest tech firms, including their grip over app stores, online advertising and internet shopping.
Together, the new laws underscore how Europe is setting the standard for tech regulation globally. Frustrated by anticompetitive behavior, social media’s effect on elections and privacy-invading business models, officials spent more than a year negotiating policies that give them broad new powers to crack down on tech giants that are worth trillions of dollars and that are used by billions of people for communication, entertainment, payments and news.
“This will be a model,” Alexandra Geese, a Green party member of the European Parliament from Germany, said of the new law. Ms. Geese, who helped draft the Digital Services Act, said she had already spoken with legislators in Japan, India and other countries about the legislation.
A deal was expected to be announced by European policymakers in Brussels on Friday, though some warned that the agreement could be delayed if negotiators needed more time.
The moves contrast with the lack of action in the United States. While U.S. regulators have filed antitrust cases against Google and Meta, no comprehensive federal laws tackling the power of the tech companies have been passed.
Yet even as the European authorities gain newfound legal powers to rein in the tech behemoths, critics wondered how effective they will be. Writing laws can be easier than enforcing them, and while the European Union has a reputation as the world’s toughest regulator of the tech industry, its actions have sometimes appeared tougher on paper than in practice.
An estimated 230 new workers will be hired to enforce the new laws, a figure that critics said was insufficient when compared with the resources available to Meta, Google and others.
The staffing figures “are totally inadequate to face gigantic firms and new gigantic tasks,” said Tommaso Valletti, a former top economist for the European Commission, who worked on antitrust cases against Google and other tech platforms.
Without robust enforcement, he said, the new laws will amount to an unfulfilled promise. Mr. Valletti said that even as Europe had levied multibillion-dollar antitrust rulings against Google in recent years, those actions had done little to restore competition because regulators did not force the company to make major structural changes.
“You need skills: engineers, computer scientists, data scientists and the like,” said Mr. Valletti, who is a professor of economics at Imperial College London. “You need a cultural change, both among regulators and regulated firms. That’s the real challenge.”
Lack of enforcement of the European Union’s data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., has also cast a shadow over the new laws.
Like the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, G.D.P.R. was hailed as landmark legislation. But since it took effect in 2018, there has been little action against Facebook, Google and others over their data-collection practices. Many have sidestepped the rules by bombarding users with consent windows on their websites.
“They haven’t shown themselves capable of using powerful tools that already exist to rein in Big Tech,” said Johnny Ryan, a privacy-rights campaigner and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, who has pushed for tougher enforcement. “I don’t anticipate them showing themselves suddenly to be any different with a new set of tools.”
Amazon declined to comment. Google and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. The companies and industry trade groups have warned that the laws could have unintended consequences, harm smaller businesses and undercut Europe’s digital economy.
Backers of the new laws said they had learned from past mistakes. While enforcement of G.D.P.R. was left to regulators in individual countries — which many felt were overmatched by multinational corporations with seemingly bottomless legal budgets — the new laws will largely be enforced out of Brussels by the European Commission, a major shift in approach.
The final text of the Digital Services Act is not expected to be available for several weeks, and final votes must still be taken, a step largely seen as perfunctory after a deal is announced. But policymakers in the European Commission and European Parliament involved in the negotiations described details of what would be one of the world’s most far-reaching pieces of digital policy.
The law, which would take effect next year, does not order internet platforms to remove specific forms of speech, leaving that to individual countries to define. (Certain forms of hate speech and references to Nazism are illegal in Germany but not in other European countries.) The law forces companies to add ways for users to flag illicit content.
Inspired by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, policymakers were also considering giving regulators additional power to force internet companies to respond quickly during a national security or health crisis. This could include stopping the spread of certain state propaganda on social media during a war or the online sale of bogus medical supplies and drugs during a pandemic.
Many provisions related to social media track closely with recommendations made by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who became a whistle-blower. The law was expected to require companies to offer a way for users to turn off recommendation algorithms that use their personal data to tailor content.
Meta, TikTok and others would also have to share more data about how their algorithms worked, with outside researchers at universities and civil society groups. The companies would have to conduct an annual risk-assessment report, reviewed by an outside auditor, with a summary of the findings made public.
Policymakers said the prospect of reputational damage could be more powerful than fines. But if the European Commission determined that Meta or another company was not doing enough to address problems identified by auditors, the company could face financial penalties of up to 6 percent of global revenue and be forced to change business practices.
New restrictions on targeted advertising could have major effects on internet-based businesses. The rules would limit the use of data based on race, religion, political views or labor union membership, though there was consideration of allowing a company to continue doing so with a user’s consent. The companies would also not be able to target children with ads.
Online retailers like Amazon would face new requirements to stop the sale of illicit products by resellers on their platforms, leaving the companies open to consumer lawsuits.
Europe’s position as a regulatory leader will depend on enforcement of the new laws, which are likely to face legal challenges from the biggest companies, said AgustÃn Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the European Consumer Organization, a consumer watchdog group.
“Effective enforcement is absolutely key to the success of these new rules,” he said. “Great power comes with greater responsibility to ensure the biggest companies in the world are not able to bypass their obligations.”
The Digital Services Act would force Meta, Google and others to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads. How European officials will wield it remains to be seen.
Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton, top European officials, were among the main policymakers behind the Digital Services Act.
Credit... Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
By Adam Satariano
Adam Satariano, who is based in London, has covered European tech since 2016 and previously reported on Apple and Silicon Valley from San Francisco.
By Adam Satariano
Adam Satariano, who is based in London, has covered European tech since 2016 and previously reported on Apple and Silicon Valley from San Francisco.
April 22, 2022
The European Union was nearing a deal on Friday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of dollars in fines. Tech companies would be compelled to set up new policies and procedures to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other material defined as illegal by countries within the European Union.
The law aims to end an era of self-regulation in which tech companies set their own policies about what content could stay up or be taken down. It stands out from other regulatory attempts by addressing online speech, an area that is largely off limits in the United States because of First Amendment protections. Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, would face yearly audits for “systemic risks” linked to their businesses, while Amazon would confront new rules to stop the sale of illegal products.
The Digital Services Act is part of a one-two punch by the European Union to address the societal and economic effects of the tech giants. Last month, the 27-nation bloc agreed to a different sweeping law, the Digital Markets Act, to counter what regulators see as anticompetitive behavior by the biggest tech firms, including their grip over app stores, online advertising and internet shopping.
Together, the new laws underscore how Europe is setting the standard for tech regulation globally. Frustrated by anticompetitive behavior, social media’s effect on elections and privacy-invading business models, officials spent more than a year negotiating policies that give them broad new powers to crack down on tech giants that are worth trillions of dollars and that are used by billions of people for communication, entertainment, payments and news.
“This will be a model,” Alexandra Geese, a Green party member of the European Parliament from Germany, said of the new law. Ms. Geese, who helped draft the Digital Services Act, said she had already spoken with legislators in Japan, India and other countries about the legislation.
A deal was expected to be announced by European policymakers in Brussels on Friday, though some warned that the agreement could be delayed if negotiators needed more time.
Since Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect in 2018, little action has been taken against the data-collection practices of large internet platforms.
Credit...Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The moves contrast with the lack of action in the United States. While U.S. regulators have filed antitrust cases against Google and Meta, no comprehensive federal laws tackling the power of the tech companies have been passed.
Yet even as the European authorities gain newfound legal powers to rein in the tech behemoths, critics wondered how effective they will be. Writing laws can be easier than enforcing them, and while the European Union has a reputation as the world’s toughest regulator of the tech industry, its actions have sometimes appeared tougher on paper than in practice.
An estimated 230 new workers will be hired to enforce the new laws, a figure that critics said was insufficient when compared with the resources available to Meta, Google and others.
The staffing figures “are totally inadequate to face gigantic firms and new gigantic tasks,” said Tommaso Valletti, a former top economist for the European Commission, who worked on antitrust cases against Google and other tech platforms.
Without robust enforcement, he said, the new laws will amount to an unfulfilled promise. Mr. Valletti said that even as Europe had levied multibillion-dollar antitrust rulings against Google in recent years, those actions had done little to restore competition because regulators did not force the company to make major structural changes.
“You need skills: engineers, computer scientists, data scientists and the like,” said Mr. Valletti, who is a professor of economics at Imperial College London. “You need a cultural change, both among regulators and regulated firms. That’s the real challenge.”
Lack of enforcement of the European Union’s data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., has also cast a shadow over the new laws.
Like the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, G.D.P.R. was hailed as landmark legislation. But since it took effect in 2018, there has been little action against Facebook, Google and others over their data-collection practices. Many have sidestepped the rules by bombarding users with consent windows on their websites.
“They haven’t shown themselves capable of using powerful tools that already exist to rein in Big Tech,” said Johnny Ryan, a privacy-rights campaigner and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, who has pushed for tougher enforcement. “I don’t anticipate them showing themselves suddenly to be any different with a new set of tools.”
Amazon declined to comment. Google and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. The companies and industry trade groups have warned that the laws could have unintended consequences, harm smaller businesses and undercut Europe’s digital economy.
Backers of the new laws said they had learned from past mistakes. While enforcement of G.D.P.R. was left to regulators in individual countries — which many felt were overmatched by multinational corporations with seemingly bottomless legal budgets — the new laws will largely be enforced out of Brussels by the European Commission, a major shift in approach.
The final text of the Digital Services Act is not expected to be available for several weeks, and final votes must still be taken, a step largely seen as perfunctory after a deal is announced. But policymakers in the European Commission and European Parliament involved in the negotiations described details of what would be one of the world’s most far-reaching pieces of digital policy.
The law, which would take effect next year, does not order internet platforms to remove specific forms of speech, leaving that to individual countries to define. (Certain forms of hate speech and references to Nazism are illegal in Germany but not in other European countries.) The law forces companies to add ways for users to flag illicit content.
Inspired by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, policymakers were also considering giving regulators additional power to force internet companies to respond quickly during a national security or health crisis. This could include stopping the spread of certain state propaganda on social media during a war or the online sale of bogus medical supplies and drugs during a pandemic.
Many provisions related to social media track closely with recommendations made by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who became a whistle-blower. The law was expected to require companies to offer a way for users to turn off recommendation algorithms that use their personal data to tailor content.
Meta, TikTok and others would also have to share more data about how their algorithms worked, with outside researchers at universities and civil society groups. The companies would have to conduct an annual risk-assessment report, reviewed by an outside auditor, with a summary of the findings made public.
Policymakers said the prospect of reputational damage could be more powerful than fines. But if the European Commission determined that Meta or another company was not doing enough to address problems identified by auditors, the company could face financial penalties of up to 6 percent of global revenue and be forced to change business practices.
New restrictions on targeted advertising could have major effects on internet-based businesses. The rules would limit the use of data based on race, religion, political views or labor union membership, though there was consideration of allowing a company to continue doing so with a user’s consent. The companies would also not be able to target children with ads.
Online retailers like Amazon would face new requirements to stop the sale of illicit products by resellers on their platforms, leaving the companies open to consumer lawsuits.
Europe’s position as a regulatory leader will depend on enforcement of the new laws, which are likely to face legal challenges from the biggest companies, said AgustÃn Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the European Consumer Organization, a consumer watchdog group.
“Effective enforcement is absolutely key to the success of these new rules,” he said. “Great power comes with greater responsibility to ensure the biggest companies in the world are not able to bypass their obligations.”
NEWS ANALYSIS
As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, the U.S. Falls Further Behind
Federal privacy bills, security legislation and antitrust laws to address the power of the tech giants have all failed to advance in Congress, despite hand wringing and shows of bipartisan support
By Cecilia Kang
Cecilia Kang, who reports from Washington, has covered tech policy since 2007.
April 22, 2022
In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and on Friday was nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content.
For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three. United States: zero.
The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and it could also bring the world into the so-called metaverse. But global leadership on tech regulations is taking place more than 3,000 miles from Washington, by European leaders representing 27 nations with 24 languages, who have nonetheless been able to agree on basic online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.
In the United States, Congress has not passed a single piece of comprehensive regulation to protect internet consumers and to rein in the power of its technology giants.
It’s not for lack of trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills have been proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have introduced data breach and security bills, all of which have withered on the vine. A flurry of speech bills have sunk into the quicksand of partisan disagreements over freedoms of expression. And antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.
Only two narrow federal tech laws have been enacted — one for children’s privacy and the other for ridding sites of sex-trafficking content — in the past 25 years.
“Inertia is too kind of a word to describe what’s happened in the United States; there’s been a lack of will, courage and understanding of the problem and technologies,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group. “And consumers are left with no protections here and lots of confusion.”
The prospects that any legislation will pass imminently are dim, though regulations at some point are almost inevitable because of the way tech touches so many aspects of life. Of all the proposals currently in front of Congress, an antitrust bill that would bar Apple, Alphabet and Amazon from boosting their own products on their marketplaces and app stores over those of their rivals has the best shot.
A co-author of the bill, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said Democratic leaders had promised it would go to a vote by this summer. But even that bill, with bipartisan support, faces an uphill climb amid so many other priorities in Congress and a fierce tech lobbying effort to defeat it.
If history is a guide, the path toward U.S. tech regulation will be long. It took decades of public anger to regulate the railroads through the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. It took nearly 50 years from the first medical reports on the dangers of cigarettes to the regulation of tobacco.
There’s no single reason for the sludge of progress in Congress. Proposals have been caught in the age-old partisan divide over how to protect consumers while also encouraging the growth of business. Then there are the hundreds of tech lobbyists who block legislation that could dampen their profits. Lawmakers have also at times failed to grasp the technologies they are trying to regulate, turning their public foibles over tech into internet memes.
Tech companies have taken advantage of that knowledge blind spot, said Tom Wheeler, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
“It’s what I call the ‘big con,’ where the tech companies spin a story that they are doing magic and that if Washington touches their companies with regulations they’ll be responsible for breaking that magic,” he said.
In the vacuum of federal regulations, states have created a patchwork of tech rules instead. California, Virginia, Utah and Colorado have adopted their own privacy laws. Florida and Texas have passed social media laws aimed at punishing internet platforms for censoring conservative views.
Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft said they supported federal regulations. But when pressed, some of them have fought for the most permissive versions of the laws that have been under consideration. Meta, for instance, has pushed for weaker federal privacy legislation that would override stronger laws in the state
Tech’s lobbying power is now on full display in Washington with the threat of the antitrust bill from Ms. Klobuchar and Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican of Iowa. The proposal passed its first hurdle of votes in January, much to the tech industry’s surprise.
Lawmakers Grill Tech C.E.O.s on Capitol Riot, Getting Few Direct Answers
March 25, 2021
Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulation and joined The Times in 2015. She is the co-author, along with Sheera Frenkel of The Times, of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @ceciliakang
A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2022, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Lags As Europe Promotes Tech Laws.
As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, the U.S. Falls Further Behind
Federal privacy bills, security legislation and antitrust laws to address the power of the tech giants have all failed to advance in Congress, despite hand wringing and shows of bipartisan support
By Cecilia Kang
Cecilia Kang, who reports from Washington, has covered tech policy since 2007.
April 22, 2022
In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and on Friday was nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content.
For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three. United States: zero.
The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and it could also bring the world into the so-called metaverse. But global leadership on tech regulations is taking place more than 3,000 miles from Washington, by European leaders representing 27 nations with 24 languages, who have nonetheless been able to agree on basic online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.
In the United States, Congress has not passed a single piece of comprehensive regulation to protect internet consumers and to rein in the power of its technology giants.
It’s not for lack of trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills have been proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have introduced data breach and security bills, all of which have withered on the vine. A flurry of speech bills have sunk into the quicksand of partisan disagreements over freedoms of expression. And antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.
Only two narrow federal tech laws have been enacted — one for children’s privacy and the other for ridding sites of sex-trafficking content — in the past 25 years.
“Inertia is too kind of a word to describe what’s happened in the United States; there’s been a lack of will, courage and understanding of the problem and technologies,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group. “And consumers are left with no protections here and lots of confusion.”
Antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.
Credit...Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times
The prospects that any legislation will pass imminently are dim, though regulations at some point are almost inevitable because of the way tech touches so many aspects of life. Of all the proposals currently in front of Congress, an antitrust bill that would bar Apple, Alphabet and Amazon from boosting their own products on their marketplaces and app stores over those of their rivals has the best shot.
A co-author of the bill, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said Democratic leaders had promised it would go to a vote by this summer. But even that bill, with bipartisan support, faces an uphill climb amid so many other priorities in Congress and a fierce tech lobbying effort to defeat it.
If history is a guide, the path toward U.S. tech regulation will be long. It took decades of public anger to regulate the railroads through the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. It took nearly 50 years from the first medical reports on the dangers of cigarettes to the regulation of tobacco.
There’s no single reason for the sludge of progress in Congress. Proposals have been caught in the age-old partisan divide over how to protect consumers while also encouraging the growth of business. Then there are the hundreds of tech lobbyists who block legislation that could dampen their profits. Lawmakers have also at times failed to grasp the technologies they are trying to regulate, turning their public foibles over tech into internet memes.
Tech companies have taken advantage of that knowledge blind spot, said Tom Wheeler, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
“It’s what I call the ‘big con,’ where the tech companies spin a story that they are doing magic and that if Washington touches their companies with regulations they’ll be responsible for breaking that magic,” he said.
In the vacuum of federal regulations, states have created a patchwork of tech rules instead. California, Virginia, Utah and Colorado have adopted their own privacy laws. Florida and Texas have passed social media laws aimed at punishing internet platforms for censoring conservative views.
Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft said they supported federal regulations. But when pressed, some of them have fought for the most permissive versions of the laws that have been under consideration. Meta, for instance, has pushed for weaker federal privacy legislation that would override stronger laws in the state
Tech’s lobbying power is now on full display in Washington with the threat of the antitrust bill from Ms. Klobuchar and Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican of Iowa. The proposal passed its first hurdle of votes in January, much to the tech industry’s surprise.
Amazon claimed in television and newspaper ads that an antitrust bill would effectively end its Prime program.
Credit...Roger Kisby for The New York Times
In response, many of the tech companies mobilized an extensive lobbying and marketing campaign to defeat the bill. Through a trade group, Amazon claimed in television and newspaper ads that the bill would effectively end its Prime membership program. Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a blog post that the legislation would “break” popular products and prevent the company from displaying Google maps in search results.
Ms. Klobuchar said the companies’ claims were hyperbole. She warned that by fighting the proposal, tech companies might be choosing the worse of two difficult options.
“They are letting Europe set the agenda on internet regulation,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “At least we listened to everyone’s concerns and modified our bill.”
The inaction may appear surprising given that Republicans and Democrats are ostensibly in lock step over how tech companies have morphed into global powerhouses.
“Consumers need confidence that their data is being protected, and businesses need to know they can keep innovating while complying with a strong, workable national privacy standard,” said Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi. “The U.S. cannot afford to cede leadership on this issue.”
Lawmakers have also forced many tech chief executives — including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta — to testify multiple times before Congress in recent years. In some of those televised hearings, lawmakers of both parties have told the executives that their companies — with a combined $6.4 trillion in market value — aren’t above government or public accountability.
“Some of these companies are countries, not companies,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said in a January antitrust hearing, adding that they are “killing fields for the truth.”
But so far, the talk has not translated into new laws. The path to privacy regulations provides the clearest case study on that record of inaction.
Since 1995, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, has introduced a dozen privacy bills for internet service providers, drones and third-party data brokers. In 2018, the year Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, he proposed a bill to require a consumer’s permission to share or sell data.
Mr. Markey also tried twice to update and strengthen privacy legislation for youths following his 1998 law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
With every effort, industry lobbying groups have denounced the bills as harmful to innovation. Many Republican lawmakers have opposed the proposals, saying they don’t balance the needs of businesses.
“Big Tech sees data as dollar signs, so for decades they’ve bankrolled industry lobbyists to help them evade accountability,” Mr. Markey said. “We’ve reached a breaking point.”
Reining In Big Tech
A Global Tipping Point for Reining In Tech Has Arrived
April 20, 2021
In response, many of the tech companies mobilized an extensive lobbying and marketing campaign to defeat the bill. Through a trade group, Amazon claimed in television and newspaper ads that the bill would effectively end its Prime membership program. Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a blog post that the legislation would “break” popular products and prevent the company from displaying Google maps in search results.
Ms. Klobuchar said the companies’ claims were hyperbole. She warned that by fighting the proposal, tech companies might be choosing the worse of two difficult options.
“They are letting Europe set the agenda on internet regulation,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “At least we listened to everyone’s concerns and modified our bill.”
The inaction may appear surprising given that Republicans and Democrats are ostensibly in lock step over how tech companies have morphed into global powerhouses.
“Consumers need confidence that their data is being protected, and businesses need to know they can keep innovating while complying with a strong, workable national privacy standard,” said Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi. “The U.S. cannot afford to cede leadership on this issue.”
Lawmakers have also forced many tech chief executives — including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta — to testify multiple times before Congress in recent years. In some of those televised hearings, lawmakers of both parties have told the executives that their companies — with a combined $6.4 trillion in market value — aren’t above government or public accountability.
“Some of these companies are countries, not companies,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said in a January antitrust hearing, adding that they are “killing fields for the truth.”
But so far, the talk has not translated into new laws. The path to privacy regulations provides the clearest case study on that record of inaction.
Since 1995, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, has introduced a dozen privacy bills for internet service providers, drones and third-party data brokers. In 2018, the year Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, he proposed a bill to require a consumer’s permission to share or sell data.
Mr. Markey also tried twice to update and strengthen privacy legislation for youths following his 1998 law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
With every effort, industry lobbying groups have denounced the bills as harmful to innovation. Many Republican lawmakers have opposed the proposals, saying they don’t balance the needs of businesses.
“Big Tech sees data as dollar signs, so for decades they’ve bankrolled industry lobbyists to help them evade accountability,” Mr. Markey said. “We’ve reached a breaking point.”
Reining In Big Tech
A Global Tipping Point for Reining In Tech Has Arrived
April 20, 2021
Lawmakers Grill Tech C.E.O.s on Capitol Riot, Getting Few Direct Answers
March 25, 2021
Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulation and joined The Times in 2015. She is the co-author, along with Sheera Frenkel of The Times, of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @ceciliakang
A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2022, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Lags As Europe Promotes Tech Laws.
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