In his 1973 collection of essays Small is Beautiful, the economist E.F. Schumacher contrasted nature with technology. Nature, he argued, always “knows when and where to stop”, whereas “technology recognises no self-limiting principle – in terms… of size, speed and violence”.
The warning predated the invention of the World Wide Web by 16 years but defines the challenge faced by big tech today: on all three of Schumacher’s counts, internet technology is defying its natural limits.
In terms of speed, technological disruption is now so rapid that jobs being lost to robots is the least of our worries. The founders of Skype, SpaceX, Microsoft and Google Deepmind all now warn of the risk of uncontrollable and potentially civilisation-destroying artificial intelligence within a matter of years.
“Artificial intelligence holds enormous promise but without proper testing can cause great harm.”
In terms of violence, digital companies have been seemingly powerless to prevent everything from hate speech and fake news to sexual exploitation and terrorism, from blemishing their platforms.
These glitches should matter as much to entrepreneurs in Old Street or Silicon Valley as they should to politicians in Westminster or Washington. Increasingly the biggest firms are not just ubiquitous in the markets they operate in, but guard access to the system entirely, through devices, marketplaces and integrated logins. Their scale is such that, without action, it is hard to see how competition and innovation will not be stifled.
The question is therefore not whether to regulate, but how. Of the legislative capitals, Brussels has been most gung-ho to date, leveraging exorbitant fines on Google and grandstanding at regular intervals. Amongst commentators, a common rallying cry is for Big Tech to be broken up – in the manner that American meat and cigarette monopolies were disbanded at the end of the 19th century.
These responses are tempting for regulators – they get headlines and look tough. But people don’t want companies to be punished for bringing them amazing products, they just want those products to be better controlled and to not feel powerless in the face of big firms’ size and strength. For consumers, too, such approaches offer false promise: digital products will cost more and offer less if network effects and economies of scale are lost.
Collaboration is required
Instead of breaking up online platforms, regulators should make it much easier to cross-pollinate between them.
This means making sure that people leaving one platform can easily take their posts, contacts and photos with them, into storage or to a rival. It might even mean forcing social media to become truly interoperable, just as email, phones and websites have always been, so that everyone has an identifiable marker, and anyone can read and respond to their posts, irrespective of what service they use.
Next, governments should support data exchanges to help people understand the uses and value of their data, and to sell or donate it securely.
Platforms like CitizenMe and QNTFY are already enabling people to earn money or do good with their data, but data ownership has yet to go mainstream. Only when we have commercial control of our data, in full knowledge of its uses and with ability to trade different aspects of our digital lives, will we take seriously our rights to own it.
“Technological disruption is now so rapid that jobs being lost to robots is the least of our worries.”
Finally, governments should demand greater transparency for how companies use complex algorithms to manipulate information.
Artificial intelligence holds enormous promise but without proper testing can cause great harm.
In the US, algorithms already stand accused of racial bias in the courts, driving gender pay gaps in the gig economy and misdiagnosing patients in hospitals. Companies should be required to test systems in a safe environment, meet legal safety standards, or even publish algorithms for peer review, to reduce unforeseen effects without damaging enterprise.
Over the last few decades, digital markets have transformed the world immeasurably, and mostly for enormous good.
But for a set of technologies founded on principles of plurality and open access, they have also proved remarkably prone to market concentration and abusive power. It’s time to fix the error code and return to the commons of the internet.
Will Tanner was an adviser to Theresa May from 2014-17 and deputy head of the Policy Unit during her first year in 10 Downing Street