View: The change of guard in the US is an opportunity to enforce true accountability over the internet industry​​​​​

In recent days, we have witnessed an historic presidential election in the United States — one that will entirely reorient America’s approach with India in the coming years. I worked at the White House during the Obama administration and know that this will no doubt be an extraordinarily busy couple of months as the presidential transition team forms the shape of the new administration and its policy priorities. But for the Indian — and global — citizen, there is perhaps no issue the new Biden administration will tackle that is more important than technology and internet policy reform. These are the areas that the new Biden administration must — and I believe will — tackle.

The Biden administration is behooved to consider a path forward to developing a fundamental privacy law — a law that provides baseline protection over all forms of consumer and citizen data, no matter the context. Luckily, there are existing threads that it can examine to move forward — including President Obama’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which pared down the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation for California  residents. The central problem the administration will face is how it should design legislation that gives consumers choice, control, and transparency in the face of corporations.

Public opinion has shifted dramatically over the past three years to the extent that in 2020, people believe that big tech exerts far too much monopoly power over the rest of society. The Democrat-led House antitrust report released last month gives a good indication of where the Biden administration is; the report suggested that we must modernise mechanisms of antitrust law and enforcement in the way forward. There will be more investigation — in the administration, Senate, and House — into the possibility of breakup and the idea of utility regulation for the big tech firms to rebalance the distribution of power between consumers and Silicon Valley’s most powerful firms.

The Obama FCC, under the leadership of Chairman Tom Wheeler, reclassified broadband providers from Title I of the Telecommunications Act to Title II — a measure that regarded that provision of broadband as a technical and economic matter had transitioned from being a sophisticated ordeal requiring substantial innovation in operation, to essentially a public utility service. The current Chairman under Trump, Ajit Pai, pulled this order back and classified them as Title I operators once again against popular opinion — but we can expect that an FCC during a Biden administration, with a majority of Democratic commissioners, will reconsider this in its first days. Any potential reclassification to Title II might also be followed by a push for Congress to legislatively affirm the reclassification so that it remains in place unless Congress acts again. Critically, such a reclassification would enable the advancement of more rigorous regulations, including the privacy and security measures advanced by Wheeler’s FCC, as well.

Political commentators and citizens alike are concerned about the ways in which American society is divided — and much of that division appears to be perpetuated and exaggerated by the behavioral profiling and algorithmic content curation practices of social media firms. Technology scholars and experts have variously suggested that such processes with our data and attention segment us into echo chambers, subject us to media bias, discriminate against marginalised populations, and in the end, lead to unfair outcomes for too many people. The fundamental concern is not that machine learning is used to create new efficiencies — it is rather that the public has no visibility into the decision models behind those algorithms. Democrats have made a number of major pushes for platform transparency in the context of these algorithms that define the digital media experience — for instance, through the Honest Ads Act and various data broker transparency bills — and we can expect the administration to conduct a close review of all options on the table in this realm.

This part of the Communications Decency Act is seen as a free pass for internet companies on all content-related matters – a blanket liability shield protecting them from regulatory scrutiny. The law clears internet firms like Facebook and Google of liability for user-generated content disseminated on their platforms, and for takedowns of any content the firms wish to censor. Republicans and Democrats alike however —including President-Elect Biden — have suggested that these protections should be reconsidered. We can expect that the new administration will collaborate with Congress to develop reforms to the law. Some scholars have suggested carve-outs from the liability shield should be considered — including for content that promotes onspiracy, disinformation, hateful conduct, violence, exploitation and the like. All of these potential measures will generate new reckoning for Silicon Valley — and force all of us around the world to consider the power that technology corporations have over us today. More importantly, under this new administration, we will once again have the opportunity to enforce true accountability over the technology and internet industry and place the interests of the individual consumer first.