After the recent flurry of news around Facebook, we asked former Federal Communications Commission Chairman and Brookings Visiting Fellow Tom Wheeler a few questions about social media regulation.
Why are social media platforms so hard to regulate?
Internet capitalism is raw and new. For the last couple of decades, digital innovators have been able to act like pseudo-governments to make their own rules. We saw the same thing in the industrial revolution. Ultimately—then as now—the resulting abuses made it necessary for government to become more than an observer. The challenge of regulation in the digital era is that digital innovation has replaced industrial era concepts. Our statutes and regulatory structures were designed for a set of industrial circumstances built around hard assets (vs. today’s software), and economic assumptions such as scale economies (vs. today’s network effects). We are just beginning to emerge from defining tomorrow by what we knew yesterday.
Do you think that Congress will finally take some action to rein in Facebook after Frances Haugen’s testimony this week?
I certainly hope so, but Facebook is just the canary in the coal mine. The broader issue is meaningful oversight of the dominant digital platforms. Two forces seem to have now come together which could advance action. One is the bipartisan nature of concern about what Ms. Haugen documented. The other is Facebook’s advertising campaign calling for regulation. While what Facebook has proposed is pretty weak tea carefully designed to protect its revenue model, it is at least a starting point. Thanks to Ms. Haugen, there is a new level of public understanding about why regulation is necessary. It is now time to move from discussion to action and open the door to a serious debate over the specifics of digital oversight.
What would be a good first step for Congress to take to start to hold Facebook accountable?
Issues such as personal privacy, market control, and misinformation are not confined to Facebook alone. There have been multiple proposals in Congress to update the antitrust laws—this is a good idea, but antitrust alone is not sufficient to deal with the challenges digital platforms pose. There is also a need for broad-based rules that establish guardrails on digital platform behaviors. Along with Phil Verveer and Gene Kimmelman, I have proposed the creation of a federal Digital Platform Agency with the focus, expertise, and agile regulatory authority to deal with the new realities. This is a two-part challenge: first, to establish public interest expectations for the dominant platform companies; and second, to conduct such oversight in a way that keeps up with technological change without stifling innovation.
Read more of Wheeler’s research and analysis on our website and be sure to follow him on Twitter.
