Internet giants ‘governing’ us from abroad
GOOGLE, Facebook and other online media giants are “a clear and present danger to civil society” and are effectively governing our lives from abroad, Sir Peter Bazalgette has warned.
The ITV executive chairman said power was being wielded from abroad by “engineers” who may be more concerned with algorithms than ethics.
“The online world, with all its benefits, now represents a clear and present danger to civil society,” Sir Peter said. “We are being influenced – and in some cases, you could say, even governed – by people who are not in this country, many of them beginning life as engi- neers, and engineers are very fine folk but they do not necessarily think about the ethics of society. We are being governed and influenced by these people, these worldwide companies, and we would do well to think about the effect that’s having.” Mark Zuckerberg, the
chief executive of Facebook, is an engineer who founded the company while at Harvard. Facebook now has two billion monthly users.
Sir Peter was speaking at a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference and responding to a question about Sir Michael Grade, one of his predecessors at ITV, who warned a decade ago that Google and Youtube were “parasites” feeding off the content produced by traditional broadcasters.
While he did not agree with that choice of word, Sir Peter said: “Google is an extraordinary invention that has large benefits. But only now, 10 or 15 years into the digital era, are we beginning to discover some of the disbenefits.” Google’s share of worldwide advertising next year would be 21 per cent, Sir Peter said, an “extraordinary monopoly”. Along with Facebook, it “refuses to accept that it is a publisher” and instead called itself a platform, he added, despite the fact that both distributed content.
Ministers are considering a proposal to classify the media giants as publications, forcing them to uphold the same standards as newspapers, with Facebook having been accused of enabling the spread of fake news. The measures are part of a crackdown amid fears that young people are increasingly at risk from online content.