Tech titans’ arrogance led to defeat
When a powerful client demands their advisers launch a campaign publicly threatening a government, a wise counsellor always demurs. Their caution is always the same: “Governments always have the biggest guns, unlimited ammunition … and very long memories.”
Some tech titans should find better counsellors. Their determination to best governments around the world is doomed to fail. Their first defeats in Australia and Europe will soon be matched elsewhere.
Mark Zuckerberg, as always, wears the dunce’s cap. Much savvier governmentrelations bosses lead Google, Apple and Microsoft. Only someone as tone-deaf as Zuckerberg would have contemplated anything so suicidal as cutting off an entire country’s access to public health and government websites, without warning, in the middle of a pandemic.
Facebook was subsequently defeated, and making a deal with Australia will not do much to restore its reputation with an army of enraged Aussies. Sadly, it will also do little to stop the theft of content from smaller and weaker media outlets.
By contrast, Apple’s Tim Cook has made encrypted privacy for all its clients’ data a religious commitment. It’s clear that Apple regards the data as belonging to its clients. Surely, this is the best tech brand credential?
Microsoft, in a delightful smackdown of its rivals, announced a joint deal with European media — days after Facebook’s humiliation. It acknowledged the need to pay for creative content.
Not only has it supported Australia’s push for regulation and payment, it has encouraged other governments to follow suit.
One may hope that Facebook has learned a lesson. Led by a CEO with no experienced mentors, a man who has never worked for anyone but himself, he has drawn a bullseye on Facebook. Perhaps because he controls nearly half of all the media advertising in Australia, it deluded him into thinking once again he was invulnerable. He did not even have the wit to apologize publicly for Facebook’s stunning misbehaviour.
The claim that these are neutral pipelines — with no responsibility for what muck passes through them — is nonsense. Real pipelines are subject to tough penalties if any of their dangerous content spills into lakes and rivers.
Congress declared illegal the oil pipeline and supply monopoly built by John D. Rockefeller, and forced its breakup. Facebook et al are as much a utility in the digital age as were pipelines, telephones, electricity and railroads in the last century.
Why should they not be required to follow the “natural monopoly utility” tests, and be bound by the same rules as every other utility, including tough oversight on data privacy, cybersecurity and anti-competitive behaviour?
Breaking them up may not be the best approach, as in several cases — most recently AT&T — the parts merely congealed into each other once again.
Five Facebooks governed by five new Zuckerbergs would hardly be progress. Tough anti-competitive measures and regulatory oversight of their payment for content would be.
This year, the first satellites able to provide high-speed broadband from Inuvik to Ucluelet is coming. Many in rural and remote Canada will have increased ability to make phone calls, send and receive messages and email, and watch news and entertainment — some for the first time.
If the new systems perform as advertised, they may mean the demise of cable TV, landline telephones and broadcast media. The internet, for many Canadians, may become their sole communication connection, and therefore our most important utility.
Who will we still turn to for search and messaging? Two foreign monopoly utilities: Facebook and Google. We need to put the foundations in place for this new Canada: incentives for satellite access, and increased support for Canadian digital innovators on those satellites.
Ottawa needs to start this year with tough new laws and regulations to make access affordable and available, and to ensure social media platforms are respectful of client data. They might begin with reining in Google and Facebook — along with any other tech company that mocks its responsibility to data security, its obligation to eliminate poison from its platform, and the need to pay creators fairly for their content. Robin V. Sears was an NDP strategist for 20 years and later served as a communications adviser to businesses and governments on three continents. He is a freelance contributing