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.”

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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

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Photo credit: Louvre Museum. Blondel, La dispute de Minerve et de Neptune au sujet d'Athènes. Esquisse de plafond.