How a compliance mindset undermines antitrust reform proposals

For years, technology ethicists have considered how to square the interests of major companies with the interests of society as a whole, and recent approaches to ethics in the technology industry provide a cautionary tale for antitrust policy. Our data ethics research shows that Big Tech companies tend to approach challenges from the perspective of compliance: that as long as a company ticks the boxes on a checklist, it is in the clear. While checklists can highlight concerns, they do not necessarily lead to ethical actions. Current approaches to antitrust threaten to extend a compliance mindset, which will likely result in efforts that ostensibly tackle market power but fail to protect consumers.