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Why Europe, not Congress, will rein in big tech
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2018 06:44:25 -0400
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: April 16, 2018 at 6:12:54 AM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Europe, not Congress, will rein in big tech Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com Why Europe, not Congress, will rein in big tech By Michael Birnbaum and Tony Romm Apr 15 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/why-europe-not-congress-will-rein-in-big-tech/2018/04/14/a39c8cd8-2e33-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html> U.S. lawmakers demonstrated an increased appetite for regulating technology giants when they grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about privacy last week. But the future of Facebook’s relationship with its 2 billion users is less likely to be determined from the halls of Congress than it is from an unassuming 18th-century townhouse in Ireland’s capital packed with lawyers, technology experts and gumshoe investigators. Europe has been moving aggressively to impose order on the tech space. Already, it has inflicted painful penalties on Apple and Google for their business practices. Now, technology companies are readying themselves for sweeping new privacy rules that will go into effect next month across the European Union. They could face billion-dollar fines if they fail to give European users far more control over their personal information. Whether Congress follows the European model, as some lawmakers floated last week, or whether big tech companies determine it’s too cumbersome to treat the 500 million people of the European Union differently from the rest of the world, Europe is likely to keep setting the global pace for aggressive regulation. “As a first mover, that has now become a baseline,” said Dean Garfield, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based trade group for tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. Europe “is increasingly setting the norm.” And Europeans have embraced the role. “The E.U. is a real regulatory superpower, and it exports its values and its standards,” said Christopher Kuner, a director of the Brussels Privacy Hub at the Free University of Brussels. At the center of the action is Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data protection commissioner. Because the European operations for many big technology companies are headquartered in low-tax Ireland, Dixon is set to become the top cop for U.S. tech giants that include Facebook, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and Airbnb when the new privacy regime comes into force on May 25. She will have the power to slap companies with fines of up to 4 percent of global revenue — which for Facebook could mean penalties of up to $1.6 billion. “Their business model is around monetizing personal data, and this creates very significant challenges in terms of fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals,” Dixon said in an interview in her Dublin townhouse office. “It creates a type of surveillance and tracking of individuals across the Internet that undoubtedly needs regulation.” Facebook’s latest scandal has been perfectly timed to draw attention to Europe’s long-planned privacy rules. On April 4, the company said “malicious actors” had used its search tools to match previously hacked email addresses and phone numbers to Facebook profiles. That follows the company’s report that Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm hired by President Trump during his 2016 campaign, improperly accessed 87 million Facebook users’ names, “likes” and other personal information — in many cases without their knowledge or consent. The matter has spawned investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Dixon joins an elite rank of enforcers, many of whom happen to be women, holding power over the U.S. tech industry. Her partners include Andrea Jelinek, an Austrian data protection regulator who is expected to lead a new board of E.U. consumer-privacy cops. In the E.U. capital of Brussels, top justice official Vera Jourova has challenged Facebook in recent weeks over the Cambridge Analytica affair. And then there’s Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief. She thwacked Google with a nearly $3 billion fine and is forcing it to overhaul how it presents sponsored shopping results. She is making Apple pay $16 billion in back taxes to Ireland. Vestager, who was in Washington on Friday, has said she is increasingly turning her attention to issues around user data — a development that has cheered privacy advocates and chilled technology companies, which complain they are being targeted for their success. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
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- Why Europe, not Congress, will rein in big tech Dave Farber (Apr 16)