Wired - America Can Still Achieve Its Techno-Utopian Dream

In Wired, Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, advocates for further regulation of the monopolistic powers within Silicon Valley by considering antitrust legislation from U.S. and Great Britain’s past.

NOT SO LONG ago, the US tech industry was the global leader not only in imagining a better tomorrow but actually building it. It brought people closer together, broke down old power structures, and empowered individuals to understand the world in entirely new ways. But in time, the titans of the industry—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—largely captured control of the digital economy. Now, rather than bringing forth radically better ideas, these five super-large corporations increasingly spend their days appropriating other peoples businesses and devising new ways to manipulate individuals and society as a whole.

There are many problems with how these corporations use their power. For starters, as anyone tracking this election cycle understands, many of these platforms’ policies directly threaten democracy, and their hold over the advertising industry has proved catastrophic for news publishers. These behemoths also threaten our personal liberties by storing and wielding vast tranches of data about almost every company and individual in the nation, then using it to direct some of our most intimate actions and decisions.

One of the biggest problems is that the vast reach of these corporations—combined with their growing dominance over almost every corner of our capital markets—gives them the power to shape almost all information technologies to serve their interests. And they are fast moving to capture the same control in energy, health, transportation, and entertainment. Absent action, Google, Facebook, and Amazon will shape all these technologies in ways designed to serve only their particular business models and the personal interests of their owners, even if the result is to stifle vital future innovation.

It’s time for Silicon Valley to get back to the business of building utopia. And despite widespread fear that regulators will never be able to keep up with the pace of innovation, the task will likely prove easier than we expect. The tools for curbing Silicon Valley’s power are already available and, in some cases, have been for hundreds of years. Indeed, one key to fixing the problem dates back 400 years to a battle in Parliament aimed at bringing the king under the rule of law.

Read the full article on Wired here.