Learn from Europe and the UK, where countries have been putting Facebook and other companies in check for years
of domestic violence, saw its stock price tumble, and was also hit recently by a $1 billion loss when Kylie Jenner declared it uncool.
Facebook lost nearly $50 million in market cap in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica news, displaying the volatility of these companies’ value and their need for popularity.
Popularity and consumer buy-in appear, in fact, to be the only factors with the potential to curtail their actions. In the battle of the state versus tech behemoths, culturally, symbolically and practically, the tech companies seem to be running the table.
Across the pond, it’s practically a different world.
The UK’s sharp new critique of Silicon Valley was preceded by aggressive European Union actions in the past two years.
The EU has been issuing recordbreaking fines and penalties to Apple, Facebook and Google. France is famous for its attempts to rein in Uber, Netflix and Airbnb in many cities.
Europe was also the scene where landmark erasure legislation, popularly known as the “right to be forgotten,” came into force. A Spanish citizen fought for the right to remove online information about himself that, without his consent or knowledge, had been made publicly available online after an archived issue of a newspaper was digitized.
Across the continent, Big Tech is seen as being at odds with historic, important and ideological principles by which people live. These principles also include, not least, open protest when the public is greeted with things it does not like. (The French are famously adept at protests.)
It’s been slower in the UK, but it’s coming along.
From 10 years ago, when the tech giants first started to plant their flags in London, Big Tech giants were viewed with collective wonder and excitement.
Breathless social media posts would be shared among millennials who got to visit their spaces and experience the bountiful free food, abandoning their famed cynicism briefly to pose for selfies in Google’s lobby.
Google is rapidly transforming the King’s Cross area in to Google-branded empire. Facebook is next to the area. Amazon’s new sizable headquarters are soon to be unveiled in the hip Shoreditch neighborhood.
The honeymoon is over, though. Last year, transport for London contentiously refused to renew Uber’s license to operate in London.
Alphabet-owned Deep Mind, an AI company that has partnered with Britain’s National Health Service, giving it access to personal health records, has inspired vociferous public debate.
The UK is meanwhile in the midst of a big push to bolster gigeconomy worker rights.
This shift has come at a time when, the UK’s youth have started to engage in politics actively and push back against the creep of privatization in large parts of the public sector, while also looking with a keenly skeptical eye on technology’s role in driving inequality.
As the rest of the world seems to have gotten increasingly wise to Big Tech’s abuses, the U.S. remains in love. This is either a healthy case of American exceptionalism rooted in enthusiasm for world-beating entrepreneurs, or a case of delusional naivete. Or maybe a bit of both.
I chalk it up to differences in culture and history. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple might be equally intertwined with the way consumers live on both sides of the pond, but as new debates emerge about their huge impact, they touch on wildly disparate expectations of government.
The U.S., after all is the land of big capitalism and proudly so. Deep in the bone, it’s opposed to over-regulating industry.
Tech giants don’t stand alone in forming consolidated gigantic empires. The FCC rollback of net neutrality laws, while contested, is still happening – making communications companies even stronger.
Huge mergers are still in the offing – the potential Time Warner and AT&T, and Disney and 21st Century Fox deals, being two.
Then there’s the issue of personal data. In the U.S., sharing sensitive information has historically been linked to getting credit and achieving the American dream of picket fences, cars and more, hence a bigger collective consumer ease in sharing it. Everyone’s accepted the tradeoff.
In Europe, access to personal data harks back to deep-seated anxiety about spying during the communist era. Privacy is a big deal, and so is surveillance — even if it is giving you personalized sock recommendations as a result.
Add to the stew disparate attitudes on employment and responsibility. Europe, of course, has a well-entrenched (and legislated) belief in employment rights and benefits, which stand in stark contrast with the U.S.’ historic practice of at-will employment and low-cost labor. No wonder the gig economy feels more natural here.
In the UK, tax evasion is greeted, it’s safe to say, with unilateral venom by the public (witness the Panama Papers scandal which saw scathing critiques of former Prime Minister David Cameron and other celebrities who’d been connected.) There’s a deep attachment to fairness and people being held accountable. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Donald Trump has commented that not paying taxes is smart. In fact, in the U.S., being rich is frequently associated with being smart.
British heroes aren’t business leaders and billionaires, with the exception of Richard Branson. They tend to be drawn from science, the literary world and arts.
And let’s not forget where Silicon Valley comes from: One of the big reasons Big Tech has been allowed to expand largely unfettered in the U.S. is because it’s closely linked to America’s geoeconomic strength.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon: They’re all American, and their growth feels almost patriotic.
All of which is to say, it’s somewhat understandable why the U.S. has stars in its eyes when it looks at the industrial behemoths of the internet age. But it’s just not smart in the long run. It is long past time for Americans to more closely examine Europe’s critical eye on tech.
You can be as judgmental as you like about our bad teeth and warm beer. When it comes to Facebook, Google, Apple and the rest, you just might learn something from us old fogeys. Greene is chief futurist at J. Walter Thompson/JWT’s think tank and author of the forthcoming book “Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What it Means to Our Future.”