Gov’t must hold tech giants to account

Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies MP Bob Zimmer is off to London for a meeting on Nov. 27. He’s invited Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to join him. Zimmer, the chair of Parliament’s standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics, has joined forces with Damian Collins, the British MP who chairs a similar committee in the U.K. Parliament, to host an international hearing on disinformation and fake news.

Zuckerberg has already spoken to the European Parliament on this topic but turned down a request from both Zimmer and Collins earlier this year, sending other Facebook representatives to speak for the company.

Clearly, Zimmer and Collins are hoping their collaboration can force Zuckerberg to appear and answer questions.

“We have asked Mr. Zuckerberg to appear at our committees several times and expect him to show respect for both of our great nations by appearing at this hearing to answer for his platform’s practices,” Zimmer said in a press release announcing the Nov. 27 meeting.

And they want to hear from Zuckerberg by Wednesday on whether he’ll attend or not.

Compliments to Zimmer on this important work and his persistence in getting answers, not just promises to be better, from Facebook on how the social media giant has been used (and could still be used) to tamper with elections, spread hate and fuel social unrest. This is on top of allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica to mine the personal data of millions of Facebook users (for a handsome fee, of course) with little oversight.

Hopefully Zimmer is also not amused by the address of where he had to send the letter to Zuckerberg. That may have been a cheeky joke to locate Facebook’s world headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, Calif., but we’re long past laughing about the stereotypical teenaged hacker, staying up 36 hours straight in mom and dad’s basement, fuelled by Red Bull, pizza and mischief, to break into the school database to give himself straight As.

Today, hackers work on an industrial scale to attack countries, businesses and individuals, stealing secrets and dropping viruses into networks.

This is cyber warfare but Zuckerberg doesn’t like that kind of language to describe any of Facebook’s two billion users because it then requires him to act, hiring potentially tens of thousands of staff and spending billions of dollars overseeing the utopian online community he hoped to create.

Zuckerberg is no different from the corporate industrial giants of the late 19th and early 20th century, the John Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegies and J.P. Morgans of the Gilded Age in the United States. As those men did, the tech billionaires of today believe they have enriched all of society, not just their own personal wealth. Because the world is a better place because of their economic success and their philanthropic generosity, they don’t take kindly to government officials holding them responsible for the negative, unintended consequences of their companies and their products.

Eventually, the federal and state governments broke up those industrial monopolies, introduced rules to hold banks accountable to their customers, passed workers rights laws and approved environmental and safety regulations.

So far, most governments have shown little appetite in limiting the size, influence and reach of FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon). All five of those companies hold majority (and arguably monopolistic) control in their respective marketplaces, along with unprecedented access to the personal and private information of their millions of customers.

Zimmer and his Parliamentary colleagues both here in Canada and across the Atlantic need to take a broad, historical look at this issue, beyond just the problems around online security and the spread of harmful lies. The FAMGA companies have disrupted numerous sectors of the economy with significant harm at the local level, while still enjoying favourable tax benefits and minimal regulatory oversight.

The federal government, starting with Zimmer’s committee, has the authority to pass tough new rules, along with costly taxes and licensing fees, on all of these companies if they so choose.

Even if Zuckerberg decides to show up to that London meeting at the end of the month, Zimmer and Collins should sharpen their pencils and look for practical ways to make these companies behave more responsibly.