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Only in the last few years has it seen a landmark law for Europe. online privacy approved sweeping regulations to come into effect curb the dominance It was one of the tech giants and was nearing an agreement on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content on Friday.
This is Europe for the scorers: three. United States: zero.
The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and also bring the world to the so-called. metadata store. But global leadership on technology regulation is held by European leaders, who, more than 3,000 miles from Washington, represent 27 countries in 24 languages and can still agree on key online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.
In the United States, Congress has not passed a single sweeping act to protect internet consumers and curb the power of tech giants.
Not for trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills were proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have brought in data breach and security bills, all of which have faded on the vine. A wave of speech bills sank into the swamp of partisan disagreements over freedom of speech. Antitrust bills to curtail the power of Facebook and Instagram owners Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta have been left in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.
Only two narrow federal tech laws have been passed in the last 25 years – one for children’s privacy and the other to get rid of sex trafficking sites.
“Inertia is too much of a word to describe what happened in the United States; Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group, said there is a lack of will, courage and understanding on issues and technologies. “And consumers are left here with no protection and a lot of confusion.”
While the odds of any legislation being passed soon are slim, regulations at some point are almost inevitable due to the way technology touches so many aspects of life. Of all the proposals currently before Congress, an antitrust law that would prevent Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon from raising their own products in their marketplaces and app stores relative to their competitors’ products offers the best chance.
One of the bill’s co-authors, Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, said Democratic leaders promised that the bill would go to a vote this summer. But even this bill is facing an uphill climb amid its bipartisan support, many other priorities in Congress, and a fierce tech lobby effort to beat it.
If history is a guide, the road to US tech regulation will be long. With the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, it took decades of public ire to regulate the railroads. From the first medical reports on the dangers of smoking to the regulation of tobacco, nearly 50 years passed.
There is no single reason for the mud of progress in Congress. The proposals are caught in the age-old partisan divide on how to protect consumers while promoting business growth. And then there are hundreds of tech lobbyists blocking laws that could reduce their profits. Lawmakers have also at times failed to grasp the technologies they are trying to regulate. public weaknesses internet via technology Humor.
Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said tech companies are taking advantage of this information blind spot.
“That’s what I call the ‘big con,'” he said, “where tech companies are making up a story that they’re doing magic and that if they touch Washington companies with regulations, they’ll be responsible for breaking that magic.”
In the vacuum of federal regulations, the states instead created a set of technical rules. California, Virginia, Utah, and Colorado have passed their own privacy laws. Florida and Texas passed social media laws aimed at penalizing internet platforms that censor conservative views.
Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft have said they support federal regulations. But when it was printed, some fought for the most permissive versions of the laws under review. meta, for example, weaker federal privacy legislation will override stronger laws in those states.
Tech’s lobbying power is now on full display in Washington with the threat of antitrust bill from Ms. Klobuchar and Iowa Republican Senator Charles E. Grassley. The proposal passed the initial voting hurdle in January, to the tech industry’s surprise.
In response, most tech companies launched an extensive lobbying and marketing campaign to beat the bill. Amazon claimed in television and newspaper ads through a trade group that the bill would effectively end its Prime membership program. Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote: blog Announce that the legislation will “break” popular products and prevent the company from displaying Google maps in search results.
Ms. Klobuchar said the companies’ claims were exaggerated. Struggling with the proposal, she warned tech companies could choose the worse of two difficult options.
“They let Europe set the agenda for internet regulation,” said Ms. Klobuchar. “At least we listened to everyone’s concerns and changed our bill.”
Inaction may seem surprising, given that Republicans and Democrats have seemingly taken key strides in how tech companies are transforming into global powerhouses.
“Consumers need confidence that their data is protected, and businesses need to know they can continue to innovate while adhering to a strong, enforceable national privacy standard,” said Senator Roger Wicker, Republican from Mississippi. “The United States cannot afford to give up the leadership on this issue,” he said.
Lawmakers have also forced several tech executives to testify before Congress multiple times in recent years, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. In some of these televised hearings, lawmakers from both sides told executives that their companies—with a combined market capitalization of $6.4 trillion—are not above government or public liability.
“Some of these companies are companies, not countries,” Senator John Kennedy, a Republican of Louisiana, said at an antitrust hearing in January, adding that he was “killing fields for truth.”
But so far, the speech has not been translated into new laws. Path to privacy regulations provides the clearest case study of this record of inaction.
Since 1995, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey has passed a dozen privacy bills for internet service providers, drones, and third-party data brokers. In 2018, when Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force, it proposed a bill that would require the consumer’s consent to share or sell data.
Mr. Markey also tried twice to update and strengthen youth privacy law in line with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 1998.
With every effort, industry lobby groups have denounced the bills as harmful to innovation. Many Republican lawmakers opposed the proposals, saying they did not balance the needs of businesses.
“Big Tech sees data as dollar signs, so for decades they’ve provided money to industry lobbyists to help them escape accountability,” said Mr. Markey. “We’ve reached a breaking point”
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