Too Big To Care (with Tom Kemp)
We can't stop Big Tech. We can only hope to contain it.
The five companies that comprise “Big Tech”—Amazon, Apple, Google/Alphabet, Meta/Facebook, and the O.G., Microsoft—command a sizable chunk of the U.S. economy. We like, use, and rely on their goods and services to such a degree that trying to live without them is next to impossible.
They are also monopolistic entities that gobble up both upstart competitors and complementary businesses: Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. Google bought YouTube. Amazon is the world’s largest online store but also maintains the servers that power much of the internet.
And they know enough about us to be virtually omniscient. “The big difference between these modern-day robber barons is that, you know, Standard Oil was powerful, but they didn’t know everything about you,” says the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Kemp, author of the forthcoming Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “And that’s the key differentiation. They”—the gods on Big Tech’s Mount Olympus—“literally know more about you that some of your friends and family, etc., and that can be bent in a bad direction. And it’s going to get worse as we start adding more AI that feeds off that data.”
Kemp’s (excellent) book offers gruesome details about this sort of Orwellian invasion of privacy. When our data is used for targeted advertising, that’s one thing. But it doesn’t end there. The same technology that keeps showing me lease deals if I do a few searches for new cars also works “if someone in Idaho looked up an abortion clinic, or did a Google Maps to an abortion clinic in Washington and got directions,” Kemp says. “Because now, that’s actually illegal to go out of state in Idaho and get an abortion. So it can be weaponized against you.”
We don’t need to go back far in Google search to find an example of Big Tech nefariousness. In Nebraska, a red state that in the wake of Dobbs enacted strict anti-abortion laws, a woman pleaded guilty this week after Meta, the parent company of Facebook, turned their Facebook messages related to the abortion incident over to the police.
Protecting ourselves against Big Tech is not easy. They have all the data. They do whatever the fuck they want with that data (oh, and sometimes, that data gets stolen). They have a monopoly or duopoly on pretty much everything we do online. Despite Google’s infamous directive—DON’T BE EVIL—they will happily side with the bad guys if it means making a few extra bucks. They spent upwards of $70 million on lobbying last year. They have almost infinite resources to invest in litigation and lawyers. They are regulated about as well as the railroad industry was during the Grover Cleveland Administration—the first one. And the Congress doing that regulating skews much older than the population at large, and certainly older than the median age of the folks doing the heavy lifting in Silicon Valley.
Not only that, but Section 230—a section of Title 47 of the United States Code that was enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is itself Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996—gives these Big Tech companies enormous protections regarding the content that appears on their platforms. The argument is that internet platforms are just that, platforms, and not publishers. This is both good and bad. It allows, for example, someone like me to write what I write on Substack, without Substack having to police my posts. But it also allows Ginni Thomas, for example, to post crazy shit on Facebook without Meta having to worry about being sued. When social media companies moderate their content, it’s for the benefit of the other users, not to adhere to governmental oversight. (This usually means sex workers are banned while Nazis are amplified, because free speech.)
Striking down Section 230 may well destroy the internet as we know it. We don’t want that. But there is clearly some room for reform. “When the platform providers start algorithmically amplifying specific content,” Kemp muses, “do they actually start becoming a publisher as opposed to simply being a neutral platform?” That’s an argument a smart lawyer should be making, in court, to Elon Musk’s lawyers.
Social media is a chaos right now. People want a better product: a Facebook that doesn’t abet genocide or perform covert psychological experiments on its users or pump Kremlin disinformation into the discourse; a Nazi-free Twitter. This seems like the perfect moment to make meaningful change. But that has to come from the government, which means it has to come from us. The Big Tech companies, as Kemp puts it, are “too big to care.”
In Containing Big Tech, he suggests a number of laws we could enact to curb the power of Silicon Valley—I’m a big fan of the potential of the California Delete Act—and he’s working to put some of these policies in place in California, where he lives.
“It’s a damned shame that in the United States, that we do not have a federal privacy law,” Kemp says. “We have no rights.” As it stands now, Big Tech holds all the cards. “The fundamental issue is, we still have too much power and too much dominance of core markets in the hands of very few entities and organizations, and that’s just not healthy for our democracy [or] our society.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S5 E19: Too Big To Care: Containing Big Tech (with Tom Kemp)
Five companies in Silicon Valley run the online world–which gives them enormous offline power. Greg Olear talks to Tom Kemp, the Silicon Valley-based CEO and entrepreneur and author of “Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy,” about the perils of Big Tech: what they do, what they shouldn’t be allowed to do, and how the government can contain the industry. Plus: ask your doctor if CRUZAC © is for you!
Follow Tom:
https://twitter.com/TomKemp00
Visit his website:
https://www.tomkemp.ai/
Order the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Containing-Big-Tech-Protect-Democracy/dp/1639080619
Photo credit: Louvre Museum. Blondel, La dispute de Minerve et de Neptune au sujet d'Athènes. Esquisse de plafond.
OMG! This is big stuff! I worked for the SOTS in CT. Where the first merger of Insurance Co.’s and Banking occurred. And I thought that was the beginning of the end! HS! This is scary stuff. And there’s no oversight as there is for LLC’s and CO’s. Great insight and info Greg! This stuff is scary shit!
Since first seeing "All That Jazz" back in the 80s, which is a FANTASTIC film about/not about Bob Fosse, during which was introduced to me Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief, I've realized that the same five stages apply to LOTS of other things: relationships ending, the constant travails of politicians that pretend to work "for the people" while lining their own pockets, and now the invasion of Big Tech into our lives.
The five stages are: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, not necessarily in that order but usually, and always ending with acceptance. As far as Big Tech is concerned, the operative word being "BIG," one is prone to finally reach the level of "fuck it!" which is the new acceptance. We can be angry or depressed about it, and still accept it. We can even try and bargain with it -- I still remember my open-mouthed shock at being presented with TWO choices for ad serving; either let the Acme Store know where you live and your ads will be personalized, or don't and you'll just get generic ads. My shock was that I couldn't choose "NO ads! Where's the no ads choice? WTF?" Can you imagine? Ahh, the late 90s.... LOL
The truth is that if we are to be citizens of the online 21st century, anything less than "acceptance" is an exercise in wheel-spinning in quicksand. We can sign up for the "Do Not Call" lists, but we still get calls, "we noticed, after the hailstorm, that your roof might need some repair, can we come out and give you a FREE estimate?" Hang up. Block number. We can "unsubscribe" from email junk, but is it REALLY unsubscribing, or is it just telling the offending emailer that they've hit a live email address? It's a quandary.
I'm not trying to be a complete Debbie Downer and have already added "Containing Big Tech" to my Amazon Wish List, but when some of us (most of us) have spent 25+ years putting our information online, it would be dumb to think that some stinky capitalist out there wouldn't figure out a way to monetize that same information. Serving ads to people are a multi-billion-dollar business, but there are ways to lessen their intrusions with Ad Blockers and such. The info is out there, and everyone has it, and more importantly KEEPS it forever. It's BIGGER than anyone, and though we may fight it, for sanity's sake, it's probably best to do what you can to protect yourself, but otherwise accept it.
(ALSO, because Big Tech is notoriously unreliable, always copy a long comment like this to your clipboard before posting, in case Substack goes down like it did this morning when I hit Post. Stupid computers.)