Can we still say no to Big Tech?
‘‘ Innovation is the key to increasing economic growth and raising living standards. — Benjamin Bergen and Goldy Hyder
What is the appropriate time to let your kids get on Instagram? For some reason, it’s a question I’ve been presented with more than once this week by both friends and colleagues.
I shouldn’t be surprised, though. It’s a common query to a common problem.
But lingering underneath it is a more perplexing, deeper issue: Is it possible to refuse something like social media?
Put another way: Can we still say no to Big Tech? That question has been on my mind recently as the European Union is set to enact an expansive new piece of legislation called the Digital Markets Act, or DMA.
While it is a complicated law, what it ostensibly aims to do is make it so that Big Tech and its solutions aren’t the only options for Europeans.
For Canadians and their leaders, however, the new legislation also offers a lesson: that rather than only trying to live with Big Tech, we can also challenge its dominance.
Whether the DMA succeeds is, of course, another matter. Regulating tech is tricky, particularly because instituting new rules can sometimes have a perverse effect whereby only existing companies have enough resources to adhere to them.
But the DMA seems like a clear step forward. One of its key achievements is to try and unbundle the various parts of Big Tech — that is, the way Apple or Google will try and funnel users into using as many of their products as possible.
For example, it’s expected that the DMA will force companies like Apple to offer alternative ways to get and pay for apps and services on an iPhone; right now, the only way is to go through Apple. In a similar vein, Amazon will be restricted from collecting data so that it can offer competing products.
More plainly, what the DMA seeks to prevent is tech companies using their dominance to further enrich themselves.
As Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission, puts it: “We are putting an end to the so-called ‘Wild West’ dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide.”
It is a stark contrast to Canada and the U.S. South of the border, attempts at regulating tech have been ham-fisted, and it is no coincidence that the big tech companies expend significant resources on lobbying.
In Canada, we are in the process of trying to do a very Canadian thing.
The Liberal government is keen on passing three bills related to regulating the internet, one of which is Bill C-11, which will ask tech companies to fund the creation of Canadian content. The other two bills will attempt to address hate speech online and get tech to pay for news.
Those ideas are worth debating, and indeed, the privacy implications and potential overreach of state power absolutely should be critiqued.
But they are also moves of a particular flavour — that is, to ask Big Tech to address the ills caused by Big Tech.
There is a certain political logic to that. Canada does not have the clout of the EU or the U.S. While the country is a very lucrative market for Facebook, Netflix, and others, push those companies too far and they are large enough and rich enough to punish Canadians by removing features or simply using their clout to push back.
Still — what is commendable about the EU’s approach with the DMA is that it is less about simply getting tech to pay to address its flaws as it is about actually attacking the problem at its root.
Rather than legislation designed to skim some money off tech’s enormous profit, the DMA instead sinks its teeth into the more consequential areas of monopoly, competitions and the possibility of new companies emerging.
Perhaps that is what Canadian lawmakers should focus on.
After all, a legislative agenda that attempts to extract money from Big Tech runs the very real risk of simply entrenching Big Tech’s power.
What it ultimately boils down to is whether we can imagine something beyond the current scenario in which a handful of American companies have an enormous and arguably outsized impact on public discourse, media and news.
What if, in trying to live with Big Tech, we cut ourselves off from a better future?
Consider: This week, New York signed a deal with Uber to include the city’s famous yellow cabs on the app. On the surface it sounds like a win.
But as writer Edward Ongweso Jr. pointed out on Twitter, the move represents “a failure of political imagination” in that it eschews what he calls a “public alternative created and offered by the city.”
That is what is at stake: whether we can actually legislate not just to rein in Big Tech, but to do so in a manner that allows for something better than the mere privatization of all aspects of life.
Can we refuse Big Tech? As with whether we can place limits on how our children use screens, the answer is yes — but only if we actually choose to say no.