Why the Era of Big Tech Self-Regulation Must End

UNFETTERED BIG TECH, LEFT TO ITS OWN DEVICES, PRESENTS REAL AND COMPLEX RISKS TO AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY

In Australia, these risks are becoming more visible too. No one watched the way Facebook so easily ‘turned off the news’ during a global pandemic and in peak bushfire season and felt comfortable about our reliance on their products. No one observed the largescale Twitter bot activity during the 2019 Federal Election (over double the rate of the US presidential election), or Facebook’s failure to remove the bogus death tax claims, and was left with confidence that these companies were ensuring the integrity of our democratic processes. It has become increasingly obvious that unfettered Big Tech, left to its own devices, presents real and complex risks to Australian society.

While many of these risks may not be new, the scale and speed of the threat makes them starkly different. In the early years of the millennium we could not have conceived the extractive potential of surveillance capitalism, or an age of big data. And yet, Australia seems committed to addressing these risks through the ‘lightest touch’ regulatory framework possible, developed over 20 years ago.

Since the ‘90s Australia has pioneered a unique, flexible multi-path approach to industry regulation, covering four broad categories:

• Quasi-regulation --a broad set of rules and arrangements which government may actively influence but do not explicitly require compliance with
• Co-regulation --an Australian borne system where industry develops and administers its own arrangements, but government provides legislative backing to enable the arrangements to be enforced
• Black letter law --explicit regulation by primary and subordinate legislation

This multi-path approach