Last night, at an event in San Francisco, I watched the veteran tech journalist John Markoff interview early Facebook investor and Zucked author Roger McNamee. Late in the discussion, the question turned to the progress of regulations against our tech platforms. On one hand, McNamee told the crowd, it feels like nothing is happening. But on the other, everywhere you look you see hints of action. And honest-to-goodness antitrust investigations, which might have seemed unthinkable three years ago, are now
underway.
I thought about McNamee’s point this morning while reading about the $170 million in fines levied against Google by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New York as part of a settlement over alleged violations of child privacy. Here’s Makena Kelly at The Verge:
Observers were quick to point out that, in Google terms, $170 million is a paltry sum — about 37 hours worth of profit, by one estimate. Critics included members of Congress, as Natasha Singer and Kate Conger reported in the New York Times:
Other critics included the two Democratic FTC commissioners, who voted against their three Republican counterparts in an effort to block the settlement. (Here’s Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter’s dissent, and Commissioner Rohit Chopra’s.)
Then again, this is the largest-ever fine issued in connection with COPPA. And it will seemingly require YouTube to make some significant changes to the platform: limiting data collection for videos that appear to target children, ending personalized ads for those videos, and creating a $100 million fund to pay for “thoughtful, original children’s content on YouTube and YouTube Kids globally.”
In other words, just because it’s basically the least that Alphabet can do doesn’t mean it won’t have some positive consequences. Political change, like technological change, rarely happens in great big leaps — most of the time it happens in frustratingly small, iterative changes.
If this whole story sounds very familiar, it’s because we just had basically the same entire discussion about Facebook’s own settlement with the FTC. Then as now, there was a record fine that still looked tiny by revenue standards, a host of critics inside Congress and out — and meaningful changes whose effect we won’t be able to measure for quite some time. (The YouTube changes announced today won’t go into effect for four months.)
The Facebook settlement left me feeling skeptical that the United States government would succeed in reining in tech platform excess. It’s possible to read today’s YouTube news and be just as cynical. And yet I find that I’m not, mostly because there are now so many new shoes out there waiting to drop. A flurry of antitrust investigations are now underway, against Facebook and YouTube, and the latest will reportedly be announced at a press conference next week. And whatever government-mandated
changes are coming to the tech platforms, the biggest ones are likely still to come.