The U.S. government is finally advancing at the speed of technology

In the summer In 2017, my boss was Washington monthlyA policy-focused magazine in Washington, DC asked me to report a blockbuster story: the Democratic Party has include The antitrust part of “Better Deals” in the 2018 mid-term agenda.

I used the word “bombshell” ironically.This per month For ten years, the company has been publishing detailed reports on the losses caused by lax antitrust enforcement, but there has been little fanfare. Now, finally, those in power are paying attention. For the general public, some general statements about economic concentration in a document that is hardly noticed do not constitute a big story. But in the corner of our policy world, in 2017, we only heard Chuck Schumer say “Antitrust. ” Piece of mine Continue the cover.

I have been thinking about that experience recently, because antitrust headlines seem to be everywhere.this is often Suggest Laws and governments can never keep up with the pace of technology. However, events in the past few weeks have shown that recent efforts to regulate the largest technology companies may be an exception to this rule.Amazon Prime membership did not appear until 2005, that is, 11 years after Amazon was founded, it did not even reach 20 million subscribers Until 2013. Google launched the Chrome browser for 10 years. Facebook had existed for eight years before acquiring Instagram, and had existed for 10 years when it acquired WhatsApp.

Now consider antitrust. Four years ago, Lina Khan just graduated from law school a month ago, where she published a groundbreaking thesis. article Arguing that popular legal principles allow Amazon to escape anti-competitive behavior. Antitrust law is not yet a compelling issue. Khan’s suggestion may apply to technology companies whose core consumer products are free or known for being cheap, which is considered strange by many legal institutions.This week, Khan, who is only 32 years old, appointment Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, the commission is one of the two agencies with the most power to enforce competition laws. At the same time, Congress introduced a series of bills, representing the most ambitious bipartisan proposal in decades, with a clear goal of the technology industry to update the antitrust law. In other words, politics may eventually develop at the speed of technology.

In hindsight, the most striking thing about the better transaction agenda seems to be that it does not mention technology companies at all. Prior to this, the anti-monopoly campaign in DC policy circles paid more attention to traditional industries.Khan asked her to start writing articles about corporate integration, such as Meat packaging with Halloween candy. Silicon Valley still seems untouchable politically. I wrote at the time that competing with companies like Facebook and Google would “need to anger some of the Democratic Party’s most important and financially strong donors, and the Democratic Party has not yet indicated its interest in this.”

How did things change so fast? Not a smoking gun, but growing dissatisfaction has made Democrats and Republicans increasingly opposed to technology companies. For Democrats, the key factor was the creeping sense that social media platforms, whatever the political leanings of their founders, had helped Donald Trump get elected. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal These suspicions were heightened in 2018. At the same time, investigative reports continue to find evidence that far-right and racist materials are circulating on social media. At the same time—partly as a response to more aggressive content reviews on social media platforms to appease advertisers and liberal critics—conservatives are increasingly concerned that Silicon Valley’s liberals are discriminating against them.Republican politicians began to pay attention Political power That topic.