The government is now dragging in all
kinds of experts — including some of digital tech’s prominent creators —
to understand how the technology works and how to make a great industry
more open to innovation by replacing inadequate self-regulation with
some real regulation. “Congress and antitrust enforcers allowed these firms to regulate themselves with little oversight,” ..., who leads the antitrust committee in the
House. “As a result, the internet has become increasingly concentrated,
less open and growingly hostile to innovation and entrepreneurship.” This
is a theme, of course, that European regulators have been sounding for a
long time. So, does it mean that the reckoning is finally here in the
United States, too?
Antitrust laws were established for when companies made things and sold them at a price. As I noted recently, if one assumes the Seller and Buyer, the "Buyer", are a single entity and that the "social media" entity is another, the "Seller". then the Buyer pays the Seller for a product, namely the promotion and persuasion of a customer.
Specifically the Seller here identifies a target "buyer" and then knowing the psycho-predilection of the buyer sets up a persuasion psycho-action to make the buyer buy. This is a very powerful tool. The Seller psychologically profiles the buyer and then knowing that feeds the buyer with psycho-compulsive information bits to induce them to buy. The Seller is an escalated version of 1950s Madison Avenue Advertising. The next step in "MAD Men". Perhaps MAD as in mutual assured destruction.
The Antitrust laws really do not fit this very well. Perhaps the monopoly one may but that has seen little enforcement. In fact the treatise of Bork tried to bury that in the 70s.
To address this issue we are looking more at privacy and freedom of choice, neither of which we have really created laws for. This indeed is a worthy challenge.
In my opinion the simple solution is not to use these systems but then who am I to say.
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