Big Tech’s Business Model Is Broken, Report Says - WSJ

A Facebook user logs in on a smartphone. A new report is calling for stronger regulation of technology companies. A Facebook user logs in on a smartphone. A new report is calling for stronger regulation of technology companies. Photo: Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press 24 Comments By Deepa Seetharaman Sept. 24, 2018 6:00 p.m. ET Silicon Valley tech giants can’t be trusted to police themselves and should be subject to tougher regulation, including around their pattern of acquiring competitors to accumulate ever-larger stores of user data, according to a critical new report released Monday. The business models powering digital advertising platforms like Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google still undermine user privacy and incentivize disinformation campaigns despite recent efforts by tech companies to prevent abuse, says the report from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and New America, a left-leaning Washington-based think tank. “We need to completely reorganize the way that industry works,” said Dipayan Ghosh, who previously worked on privacy and policy issues at Facebook and is now a fellow at the Shorenstein Center. The report lands amid a broad discussion in the industry and in Washington, D.C., about how aggressively lawmakers should move on Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, and comes just days before the Senate Commerce Committee is due to hold a high-profile hearing on the privacy practices of several large tech companies. Google, Amazon.com Inc., Twitter Inc. and Apple Inc. will all send privacy executives to testify at the Senate hearing, along with telecommunications firms AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc. A Facebook representative isn’t scheduled to attend. The authors argue that the federal government should take the lead on regulations rather than states like California, which recently passed a tough new privacy law that the industry broadly opposes. Most big tech companies have said they are open to sensible regulation as long as it doesn’t overly curtail their ability to offer personalized products and services to consumers.