Sara Gay Forden on managing big tech: 'We have to be smart, and we have to be informed'

Big tech companies have integrated themselves into our lives “in a way that is seamless”, helping them amass influence and power that surpasses even that of governments, journalist Sara Gay Forden said on Friday at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

“We can’t even extract ourselves from these companies because we depend on them so much,” Forden said, pointing out that though her talk was titled How to Make the Internet Less Evil, technology is not inherently wicked, and has been used for good as well.

“I’m not here saying technology is evil. It has helped us stay connected, helps us work, play and shop. But just because it has given us so much that doesn’t mean we can’t admit this is okay and that’s not okay.”

The House of Gucci author, who spent 15 years reporting on the fashion industry in Milan, has been living in Washington, DC for the last decade, leading a Bloomberg News team that covers the US government’s relationship with big tech companies.

Regulations are key, Forden said. Tracing back the beginnings of big tech’s ascent to power, she pointed out how the Clinton administration, by advocating the internet’s self-regulations, had essentially given fledgling companies the opportunity to grow unchecked.

“In 1997, we see Bill Clinton coming up and saying we have to keep our hands off the internet and let companies figure out how to make money off of it, that the government should not stand in the way, and that this should be a free global trade zone,” Forden said.

“It was inconceivable at that time that these companies would have a massive power.”

Twenty-five years later, the internet has become more or less personified by the big tech companies, including Facebook, Google and Amazon.

“These companies are not million-dollar companies or even billion-dollar companies,” she said. “These are companies with hundreds of billions of dollars and some of them have even pierced the trillion-dollar mark. So they have long since learnt how to make money.

“I would argue that they have more power than the government. They have so much data,” she said. Forden said that efforts to regulate their growth have been scarcely effective.

A recent example is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the small political consulting group obtained massive amounts of personal information about Facebook users from Facebook, which was then used by the Trump administration to target potential voters. The Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation and though they fined Facebook a record-breaking $5million, there were no meaningful changes to how Facebook does its business.

“This settlement was harshly criticised by privacy advocates,” she said. “My observation is that they make so much money that fines essentially become the cost of doing business.”

Forden said the EU is showing leadership in trying to wrestle with these challenges. “They have a very strong data privacy law,” she said. However, she added that a more formidable pushback is coming not from governments but from individuals, non-profits and consumer advocates.

“They are really spending a lot of time thinking about this issue,” she said. “People like Facebook whistleblowers and people like Neil Young, who just as a person with a body of work, doesn’t want to be associated with these ideas. It’s kind of exciting to see how in the absence of government regulation, how people can seize power themselves. It brings these issues to a broader public in an even bigger way than a hearing in Washington.”

While regulating big tech companies may seem like an out-of-reach prospect now that “the horses are out of the barn”, Forden said it could be helpful drawing comparisons with other industries that have been detrimental to people’s health, such as the tobacco industry.

“Sometimes, it's almost hard to have your minds around how to fix things because it’s so nebulous,” she said. “It took people a long time to realise cigarettes were bad for your health and when they did, there were these steps that were taken.”

Forden ended the talk on a cautiously optimistic note, saying now that we have seen what the dangers are, we can be judicious about our information, and we must teach our children.

“We have to be smart, and we have to be informed.”