Breaking up Big Tech through antitrust laws would hinder innovation, says Clegg, arguing that the idea “completely ignores the benefits users gain from large network effects.” Users stick with these outsize channels because they can find “most of what they’re looking for,” he writes, like friends and content on social media and cheap consumer goods on Amazon and eBay.
Wu might concede this point, but he would disagree with Clegg’s claims that maintaining the status quo is beneficial to users. “The traditional logic of antitrust law doesn’t work,” Clegg insists. Instead, he believes less sweeping regulation can help make Big Tech less dangerous while ensuring a better user experience.
Clegg has seen both sides of the regulatory coin: He worked in David Cameron’s government passing national laws for technology companies to follow and then moved to Meta to help the company navigate those types of nation-specific obligations. He bemoans the hassle and complexity Silicon Valley faces in trying to comply with differing rules across the globe, some set by “American federal agencies” and others by “Indian nationalists.”
But with the resources such companies command, surely they are more than equipped to cope? Given that Meta itself has previously meddled in access to the internet (such as in India, whose telecommunications regulator ultimately blocked its Free Basics internet service for violating net neutrality rules), this complaint seems suspect coming from Clegg. What should be the real priority, he argues, is not any new nation-specific laws but a global “treaty that protects the free flow of data between signatory countries.”
What the former Meta executive Nick Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—is not a breakup of Big Tech but a push for it to become “radically transparent.”
Clegg believes that these nation-specific technology obligations—a recent one is Australia’s ban on social media for people under 16—usually reflect fallacies about the technology’s human impact, a subject that can be fraught with anxiety. Such laws have proved ineffective and tend to taint the public’s understanding of social networks, he says. There is some truth to his argument here, but reading a book in which a former Facebook executive dismisses techno-determinism—that is, the argument that technology makes people do or think certain things—may be cold comfort to those who have seen the harm technology can do.
In any case, Clegg’s defensiveness about social networks may not gain much favor from users themselves. He stresses the need for more personal responsibility, arguing that Meta doesn’t ever intend for users to stay on Facebook or Instagram endlessly: “How long you spend on the app in a single session is not nearly as important as getting you to come back over and over again.” Social media companies want to serve you content that is “meaningful to you,” he claims, not “simply to give you a momentary dopamine spike.” All this feels disingenuous at best.
What Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—is not a breakup of Big Tech but a push for it to become “radically transparent,” whether on its own or, if necessary, with the help of federal legislators. He also wants platforms to bring users more into their governance processes (by using Facebook’s model of community forums to help improve their apps and products, for example). Finally, Clegg also wants Big Tech to give users more meaningful control of their data and how companies such as Meta can use it.
Here Clegg shares common ground with the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, whose own proposal for reform advances a technically specific vision for doing just that. In his memoir/manifesto This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee acknowledges that his initial vision—of a technology he hoped would remain open-source, collaborative, and completely decentralized—is a far cry from the web that we know today.