The EU has picked a side in the conflict between tech giants and citizens, and have even understood the issues at hand. Finally!
About a month ago the European Parliament reached a political agreement over two proposed bills, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. These bills are supposed to make online platforms more fair and transparent, desperately needed qualities internet platforms rarely have, cementing the EU as the only serious legislator when it comes to the digital world. Much as California tries to be a leader in digital legislation it’s clear that the EU is more ambitious and more successful; as anyone who remembers the absolute barrage of emails businesses sent about the GDPR in 2018. It’s great to see a legislator taking online issues seriously and realising that legislating for the internet sometimes needs to be very different from offline legislation. Take for example the issues like eating disorders or radicalisation that can come from social media. Techno-optimists might hold that the internet and other information technology is essentially neutral; tabloids can cause eating disorders just like Instagram can so it’s a difference of medium rather than a substantive difference. But that ignores the real innovation underpinning social media. Facebook and Instagram used to be platforms where friends and family would write to each other and share photos but both started to steer users away from their flesh and blood friends to see more and more posts from unrelated third parties like memes and news via algorithms. The DSA specifically mentions that it will force tech giants to be more transparent regarding the algorithms they use to recommend users content and products, a hugely step towards a better internet.
It’s also incredible to see the EU being so pro-consumer for an entity primarily concerned with making trade between member states easier. For example the European Commission states that the DSA will guarantee people “more information about ads they are seeing on online platforms – for example, if and why an ad targets them specifically. Platforms will no longer serve behaviourally targeted ads for minors and will no longer present ads to their users based on profiling that rests on special categories of personal data, such as their ethnicity, political views or sexual orientation.” A radical change from today very clearly at the big tech firms’ expense. The internet has been a net positive to be sure, but it has enabled all kinds of bad behaviour from people and businesses and clearly needs regulation, so it’s great that the EU is technically proficient enough to understand how these platforms operate (unlike lawmakers in America) and that the objective of laws should be to make life easier for citizens, not for predatory businesses. The rest of the world has some serious catching up to do.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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