Web giants face mood shift
It’s now been five months since the mosque atrocities in Christchurch. A horrific event made all the worse by use of the internet to livestream the event and share the gunman’s ideology.
And while Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Christchurch Call in Paris promised commitment to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online, we have yet to see tangible results. Indeed, the chief executives of Facebook, Google and YouTube didn’t even show up.
Last week, there were reports of a gunman livestreaming his shooting of six policemen in Philadelphia. A report that turned out to be probably false, but theoretically still very possible.
Which begs the question as to what has fundamentally changed in terms of the ability of terrorists and extremists to harness the frictionless distribution ability of the web to share abhorrent content. And who’s had a go at creating change, apart from the prime minister in Paris?
Immediately after the gunman incident, many of the big advertisers announced they were pulling the plug on advertising with the likes of Facebook and YouTube until these platforms were prepared to lift their game.
Locally this included Spark, Vodafone, TSB, Lotto and Westpac along with most government departments.
While such a response is ethically commendable, substantively it has probably had little effect. And it is likely that by now the advertising boycott is over, with no change from the digital publishers.
More recently the New Zealand Superannuation Fund made the headlines with the news it had hatched a plan to try to get the internet giants into line.
After the mosque shootings, the Super Fund reached out to its fund manager buddies near and far to see if they could pull together a coalition of the willing, to apply pressure to the wilful.
It reckoned that if the likes of Facebook and Google-owned YouTube weren’t prepared to bend to public pressure, then maybe they’d be more willing to listen to the investment houses
that owned their shares.
It sounds like the Super Fund found itself pushing on an open door when it came to those other fund managers. It wrangled a consortium of 85 investment houses who together represent $13 trillion of funds under management. That’s pretty serious investor firepower, even to
$50 billion web companies.
Well, it would be for any normal company. In the case of Facebook, through a series of different holding companies and voting agreements, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has voting rights of 53 per cent of the company. What this means is that if he is bloody minded enough, Zuckerberg can be tone-deaf to investor sentiment as well as the public mood.
So if advertisers can’t bring about change and investors can’t bring about change, what are we left with?
If the Aussies are anything to go by, the answer is likely to lie in government regulation.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has just released its substantive Digital Platforms Inquiry. Almost two years in the making, it’s been touted as the most comprehensive investigation ever into the impact of search engines, social media and digital aggregators on competition in the media and advertising markets.
It asked the question whether the Facebooks and Googles of the world are good for Australian consumers. The answer seems to be a resounding no.
The ACCC identified many adverse effects flowing from the dominance of Google and Facebook. According to its findings, speedy action on consumer law, competition law and privacy are required to deal with the problems associated with their power and their accumulated consumer data.
Because of its uniquely concentrated power, the ACCC believes it is not possible to leave it up to normal competitive pressures to deliver good market outcomes. Rather, it’s up to the government and regulators to take action.
Such action includes making unfair contract terms illegal, creating a new entity with super powers to probe deeply into the big digital platforms, and independent testing of the search and recommendation algorithms they use.
This testing would allow the regulators to see if the algorithms delivered anti-consumer results or recommendations that manipulated people rather than empowered them.
It also proposes removing Google as the default search tool and Chrome as the default browser on Android devices.
It’s the stuff of nightmares for the web giants, and even as we
Globally it’s starting to feel like a sea change against the big digital platforms.
speak they will be working out how to stop the recommendations becoming law.
What makes it worse for them is the Aussie findings are in line with recent action by regulators in the United States and Europe.
A month ago, the US Federal Trade Commission announced a US$5b (NZ$7.9b) settlement with Facebook after the company lost control of the data of millions of people, while in Europe, Google was found to be abusing its Android market dominance and was fined €5b (NZ$8.75b).
So will the Kiwi regulators follow the ACCC’s lead?
To be clear, I don’t know, but you couldn’t help but notice Ardern has her dead serious face on whenever she discusses the issue.
Likewise, the body language between Justice Minister Andrew Little and Google’s local lobbyist in the wake of the Grace Millane case said a lot. Little looked ready to throttle the well-dressed Googler.
Globally, it’s starting to feel like a sea change against the big digital platforms, and locally it feels like we have a Government willing to lead it.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and digital adviser.