An Optimist’s Guide to Reining In Big Tech

Paul M. Barrett is the deputy director and senior research scholar of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he writes about technology’s effects on democracy. Source This book review (co-published with Just Security) discusses Regulating Digital Industries: How Public Oversight Can Encourage Competition, Protect Privacy, and Ensure Free Speech by Mark MacCarthy (Brookings Institution Press, 452 pages). Mark MacCarthy’s many years in Washington,  first as a regulatory analyst and Congressional staffer and then in corporate advocacy, have left him an unlikely optimist about regulation. He believes that now is the time to rein in the technology giants whose heft and influence have made them targets for pending antitrust lawsuits, Congressional reform attempts, and harsh rhetoric from President Joe Biden and his predecessor. In his new book, Regulating Digital Industries: How Public Oversight Can Encourage Competition, Protect Privacy, and Ensure Free Speech, MacCarthy presents an ambitious strategy for reviving the pro-regulatory energy of the 1930s. He argues that updated New Deal zeal ought to animate a new stand-alone agency to oversee companies in the fields of social media (for example, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, Google, owner of YouTube, and ByteDance, owner of TikTok); online search (Google and Microsoft); e-commerce (Amazon); advertising technology (Google); and mobile app infrastructure (Apple and Google). MacCarthy’s idealism may strike readers as naive, given the fractiousness and cynicism of today’s Washington. And yet, his cogent, highly detailed volume will be a page-turner for policy wonks…An Optimist’s Guide to Reining In Big Tech