Opinion: We need to move beyond the status quo in regulating big tech in Canada

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By Kean Birch

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Like so many before her, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gave us insight into the inner workings of Big Tech. And it was not a pretty sight. As his testimony to the US Congress in October revealed, Facebook continually puts its own profits ahead of our safety; for example, by creating fertile ground for political extremism and violence or by destroying the self-esteem of children and adolescents.

This is what one might expect from a multinational, one might say. But, like other Big Tech companies, Facebook is more than just a multinational corporation; it has become the infrastructure we rely on to live our lives – to stay in touch with friends and family, to discuss important issues with each other, to find work or clients to secure our means. sustenance and to do many other things. The addition of the other big tech companies – like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – to the mix further underscores our growing reliance on these digital behemoths.

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Canada needs to do something about it. But unlike other countries and jurisdictions around the world, Canada’s decision-makers and policy experts fail at this task. We need a systems approach to these issues, addressing both privacy and data protection as well as competition policy. Current debates are too disconnected to address the broader implications of these digital shifting sands.

Canada’s decision-makers and policy experts fail at this task

I blame this on the fact that many policy experts in Canada seem unable – or unwilling – to understand how competition, privacy, and their social implications are intertwined. This is probably due in part to the fact that we are seeing very rapid changes, but it is also a consequence, as Vass Bednar pointed out in the National Post, on whom we, our politicians and our decision-makers rely on to speak out. .

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Frankly, we trusted economists and lawyers too much; we need a more inclusive approach by opening up our policy debates and ambitions to a wider range of voices who can say something new about how Big Tech and the concentration of digital markets are negatively impacting our company. And we cannot separate the economic causes of market power from their social consequences without ceding our ability to do something about these potentially destructive effects.

Economists and lawyers do not have the answers we are looking for. Why? Because they are often attached to the status quo and a set of outdated ideas and assumptions about the world that are too focused on so-called economic damage. We must overcome this myopia; There are various social, cultural and political prejudices resulting from the mere concentration of market power in big technologies that we cannot deal with from this status quo position. In fact, there is a good chance that maintaining the status quo will only exacerbate these broader social prejudices.

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Let me give you some examples.

First, big tech companies have created personal data enclaves due to their dominance and scale in the market that are almost insurmountable. Not only do startups and competitors face significant barriers to entry, thereby discouraging innovation, but these data enclaves have also hampered regulatory efforts in Canada in the pursuit of social or political goals – a point. recently highlighted by Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien. We need to regulate the collection and use of personal data in a way that both respects privacy and opens its use beyond the current hoarding of data by Big Tech.

Second, the reason for open data is that there is a growing concentration of datasets dominating machine learning and artificial intelligence research. A new arXiv article titled “Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research” shows that research increasingly relies on a small number of datasets held by just 12 US institutions and Europeans, including Microsoft, Google, AT&T and Facebook. As these datasets become the benchmark for research, they shape not only the results of the research, but also the objectives of the research themselves – that is, the very questions that are asked.

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Third, it matters because of the way algorithmic technologies are increasingly shaped by business concerns and imperatives, beyond other considerations. As Meredith Whittaker – research director at the AI ​​Now Institute – pointed out in a recent article in Interactions, researchers’ reliance on datasets and the computing power of Big Tech – which is needed to use these datasets – means Big Tech determines the purpose of AI. technologies. The scale of Big Techs is important – both in terms of datasets and computational capacity – as it further strengthens their market power and ability to shape the future of these important technologies and their societal deployment.

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Finally, by shaping future research and technologies, Big Tech ends up expanding the inferential damage it is already causing. By that I mean the harms resulting from data analysis that attracts everyone, whether they have theoretically agreed to pass on their personal data or not. As Columbia Law School scholar Salomé Viljoen argued in The Yale Law Journal, the collection and use of personal data – by Big Tech or otherwise – now affects everyone as inferences can be made about everyone. from us on the basis of personal data. collected from other people. And we cannot do without it. As a result, market concentration and the power of Big Tech allows these companies to extend their reach beyond those who have consented to data collection.

We need to find new voices to shape our competition and privacy policies to understand the broader implications of big tech for our societies, economies and lives. We need to bring these two sides of the debate into a deeper conversation in order to understand how different people and groups are negatively affected. Examining the competition alone cannot do this. We need to hear more diversity in this debate.

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Kean Birch is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology at York University in Toronto.