2022 Was A Chaos Among Tech Titans And Everything Changed Forever

“Move fast and break things” is a popular tech mantra, but rarely have things moved faster than in the past 12 months, and rarely have things felt so broken.

Twitter, the great “digital public square” where decision makers gather, has a new owner, Elon Musk, whose kamikaze transformation of the platform has caused chaos and confusion. Meta continues to pour billions of dollars into the Metaverse, its big bet on the future of technology that owner Mark Zuckerberg has staked on his metaphorical farm that has yet to pay off, and TikTok continues to grow, but is in the shadow of suspicion due to its massive growth and concerns about it. still unsubstantiated ties with China.

In short, our tech titans are in chaos. And politicians campaigning on major technology platforms and trying to keep up with them have found themselves in the looking glass.

“I started the year with optimism that all tech companies are moving towards a more mature and regulated lifestyle – the founders have moved towards a more stable and boring fit,” said Sam Sharps, executive director of technology and public policy at the Tony Global Change Institute. Blair. “But then there was the takeover of Twitter and the Meta seemed to be more and more oriented towards Mark. [Zuckerberg’s] passionate project.

This means that the existing pressure on politicians to intervene and regulate large technology platforms is beginning to intensify as regulators realize that self-regulation will not be enough. This is happening not only in the UK, where politicians continue to try to pass Internet security legislation, but also in the United States, where antitrust officials roam, and in the European Union, where the twin Digital Services Acts (DSA) and Digital Markets Act apply ( DMA) have been passed.

“The lesson of the DMA and DSA seems to be that there is no real political disadvantage for commission members. [Margrethe] Vestager and [Thierry] Breton is into big tech, so we can probably expect more,” Sharps says. In fact, we’ve already seen it when Breton dragged Musk to meetings to remind him that Twitter must follow EU rules in order to survive.

There was a time when politicians were happy to fire technology leaders because they felt the need to help them innovate. It turned out that the benefits of rapid, uncontrolled growth outweighed the risks. But successive scandals, including the Molly Russell investigation in which social media was formally blamed for the schoolgirl’s death, have changed that view.

Not only the opinion of those who make laws has changed. The general public is also starting to realize the impact major technology platforms have on their lives and the amount of information they reveal to enhance the usability of these platforms. A recent study found that 89% of the US population believes major technology platforms should introduce more or the same amount of regulation; More than half said they would support regulators, which would be given more resources to file antitrust cases against technology companies.

Around 45% of people said they don’t trust Meta when it comes to the security of their personal information; a third said they did not trust Twitter. Of Google, 30% said they don’t trust the company to take care of their data.

The line is getting tighter and tighter — and with the rise of increasingly unpredictable individuals in charge of tech platforms, including Musk, the fit between big tech and those who oversee it has changed forever. However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to fix. “We have a huge number of new relevant rules, both in place and in development around the world, and we don’t have the experience of enforcing them yet,” said Michael Veal, Associate Professor of Digital Law at University College London. It’s also a smorgasbord of rules around the world. “One of the problems is that they don’t work well together yet and are often completely independent of each other,” Weil says.

The problem of a diverse set of rules scattered across different countries makes it difficult for companies abroad to do so efficiently and conveniently. “The platforms are already much more legally balanced than they were 10 years ago – different legal teams for different jurisdictions,” Wiele says. “This will happen more and more often. How do these disparate entities begin to diverge and play with each other and with other companies?”

These regulatory changes are hard to keep track of, especially now that the big technology bubble is bursting. Mass layoffs have affected many Silicon Valley companies, which has negatively affected their ability to please regulators. For example, Twitter has almost completely regrouped its political divisions in key areas, including in the European Union.

It comes at a most inopportune moment when politicians have decided that big tech platforms have tough questions to answer and are not afraid to use all the oversight powers they are given. “We’ll see how the new owner of Twitter wants to play, but especially in Europe, all technology platforms will face real sanctions from regulations and for the most part will take a more conservative stance than before,” says Sharps. .

Weil envisions a future in which big tech companies could try to slow things down by dragging governments into legal issues that take precedence over the rules. There’s also a fundamental problem, Weil says. “More and more countries are realizing that digital regulation is becoming an important part of their political agenda,” he explains. “But can they respond to it in practice? What can they do and what will be difficult without global cooperation?”