Don't Be Evil

by Rana Foroohar

  In the United States, Cornell law professor Saule Omarova and colleague Robert Hockett have proposed a new National Investment Authority—a hybrid of the New Deal–era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a modern sovereign wealth fund, and a private equity firm—that would develop and implement a national strategy to remake the real economy for the digital age.

  “The proposal is framed in terms of financing public infrastructure, but it is much broader and more ambitious than simply new roads,” says Omarova. “We envision it along the lines of the latter-day New Deal approach to financing transformative, large-scale, publicly beneficial projects that would create sustainable jobs and help the country regain its competitive edge—but without exacerbating inequality and excesses of private power. Even though the scope of our proposal is broader than specific AI-related problems, it specifically targets these types of structural imbalances in the economy. We think of this new proposed entity as a ‘publicly owned BlackRock’ that will finance and channel technological progress in ways that benefit all of us, and not just the richest few.”

  There are plenty of such projects in the United States that workers could be deployed on now—helping expand rural broadband, for example. The largest companies might even pledge money and excess labor for such a project, which would ultimately supply them with more customers by creating demand in low-growth areas. In a nod to the number of workers who face being downsized, you could call it the 25 percent solution. A way for companies and government to turn a potential employment disaster into an opportunity by using it to train a twenty-first-century workforce and build the public infrastructure to support it. The alternatives, slower growth and more polarized politics, are not pretty.

  How to Ensure Our Digital Health and Wellness

  This is a hard one, because the technology we’ve discussed throughout this book has been so pervasive and mind altering. One of the reasons that it’s tough to tackle the challenges wrought by Big Tech is that we spend so much time being distracted by it. Fortunately, there are those who have managed to look up for long enough to form a guerrilla movement aimed at pressuring Big Tech to adjust its business model to reduce the human costs of its products. Activists and legislators alike are taking aim at the slot machine aspects of our iPhone addiction, calling for regulation that would protect children from the most noxious types of predatory behavior and marketing online, and looking at whether all of us—kids and adults alike—should be spending a lot less time on our devices.

  The short answer—yes. If governments are empowered to restrict mind-altering drugs, then why not limit mind-altering technology, whose effects, being more profound and more ubiquitous, pose a greater hazard? The Food and Drug Administration was established back in 1906 in response to the outrage raised by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a searing account of the nauseating health hazards created by an unregulated meatpacking industry. I’m hoping that Don’t Be Evil might help create a similar environment that would foster the creation of a digital FDA for the brain, as the current FDA is for the body. It would study the effects of all the new technology—not just on our own mental health, but the health of the nation—and offer sensible regulations to ensure that the technology that’s now so indispensable is in service to us, not betraying us.

  Big Tech is, as I said in the first chapter, big. That’s one reason why we haven’t seen more of these changes, and sooner. The shifts over the past twenty years are so broad and so deep that they are still being metabolized in the public consciousness. Silicon Valley is the richest industry in history, rich enough to buy its way out of quite a lot of trouble. Its products are bright and shiny and life-changing enough that we are all too often willing to settle for the dark trade-offs. That has been the paradox: The good that it does—the information sharing, the relationship building, the productivity enhancing—has been made possible by the bad: the spying, the selling, and the utter breaches of truth and public trust. Because the positives have been so divine—the ability to summon a fact or a cab in the twinkling of an eye—the diabolical negatives have been overlooked.

  But it’s time to stop being willfully blind. With Big Tech’s wealth and power has come tremendous arrogance. There is a sense that society should be reshaped in its image—that we should all be prepared to move faster, work harder, and disrupt anything and everything. But the truth is that Big Tech answers to us—the people. The United States is in danger of becoming an oligopoly run by the wealthiest and most connected, and all too often we feel powerless to change the rules by which companies operate. We need to shake off that feeling of impotence and understand that we can make the rules of the digital economy and society what we want and need them to be. What’s more, the stakes are too high for us not to do that. The history of technology is the history of transformation. And no transformation is ever complete. Industrialization expanded opportunity even as it led to the exploitation of factory workers, which led to government reforms, which gave rise to a backlash in the form of the dominance of Chicago School, neoliberal economic ideas, as well as political libertarianism, both of which have led in turn to some of the excesses of Big Tech. And so it goes.

  Big Tech’s size and scale and speed have made it difficult to track and control. But we are beginning to understand exactly what we’ve given up to get all the bright and shiny new things that we have. No new technology remains unchanged, or keeps its hold over the public forever. The railroads once appeared to be an unstoppable force, until wise public officials put them in service to the broader economy rather than merely the robber barons who founded them. Humans are the makers of the new machines, and despite the dystopian paranoia about artificial intelligence, they are still the masters of them. With that power comes the ability and, indeed, the responsibility to select and then create the future we want from Big Tech—for ourselves, and our children.

  As for me, it’s a future that will include less screen time, and—at least in the short term—a bit more downtime. I’ve decided that my own mental health depends on checking email less, cutting off most of my social media, and turning my devices off after dinner. The same goes for my kids. I began writing this book after discovering my son had become an online game addict. Since then, we’ve worked hard to change how he relates to digital media. There’s no screen time on school nights, and he’s allowed only two-hour windows on weekend days (which means he spends a lot more time reading, as well as playing basketball at the Y). When he is online, I try to be there with him when I can, as a mother, to see what he’s doing—and as a journalist, to see what the attention merchants have cooked up next.

  Alex still loves his YouTube and his online games.

  But not as much as I love parental controls.

  For Alex and Darya

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my editors and colleagues at the Financial Times for encouraging me to write and report on the topic of Big Tech in my capacity as global business columnist.

  Thanks also to the dozens of sources who contributed their thoughts, experiences, and research to this book. Among the most helpful and supportive were Barry Lynn, Rafi Martina, Frank Pasquale, Jonathan Taplin, Tristan Harris, Roger McNamee, Kiril Sokoloff, Nick Johnson, Rob Johnson, John Battelle, Tim O’Reilly, Shoshana Zuboff, Elvir Causevic, Luther Lowe, Shivaun Raff, Lina Khan, Bill Janeway, B. J. Fogg, Glen Weyl, Luigi Zingales, Michael Wessel, Anya Schiffrin, Joseph E. Stiglitz, David Kappos, James Manyika, George Soros, and David Kirkpatrick.

  I also benefited tremendously from reading the work of former colleagues Steven Levy and Brad Stone, as well as other experts, including Jaron Lanier, Frank Foer, Cathy O’Neil, Eric Posner, Hal Varian, Carl Shapiro, Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake, Tim Wu, Saule Omarova, Robert C. Hockett, Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, Arun Sundararajan, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Kenneth Cukier, Thomas Ramge, Niall Ferguson, and Ken Auletta. At Google, I’d like to particularly thank Corey duBr
owa, who endeavored to make it easier for me to ask tough questions, Kent Walker for taking his time to share thoughts on the record, and Karan Bhatia for his insights.

  And now, for the personal—a huge thank-you to my husband, John Sedgwick, and my children, Darya and (of course!) Alex, for bearing with me on yet another book project. Also, thank you to my amazing agent, Tina Bennett, a total rock star who is always three steps ahead of the competition, and my incredibly talented, even-keeled, and hardworking editor Talia Krohn, who not only made my prose ten times better, but gave up many of her own nights and weekends to bring this book in on deadline. Ditto fact checker Julie Tate and research assistant Hannah Assadi, both of whom are top-shelf. And, finally, a huge thanks to Currency publisher Tina Constable and the entire Currency team for believing in me (again) and in the importance of this book. You all are the best in the business, and I feel so grateful to have you in my corner.

  Notes

  Author’s Note

  1. McKinsey Global Institute calculations, Rana Foroohar, “Superstar Companies Also Feel the Threat of Disruption,” Financial Times, October 21, 2018.

  2. Jeff Desjardins, “How Google Retains More than 90% of Market Share,” Business Insider, April 23, 2018.

  3. “Facebook by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics, and Fun Facts,” Omnicore, January 6, 2019.

  4. Celie O’Neil-Hart, “The Latest Video Trends: Where Your Audience Is Watching,” Think with Google, April 2016.

  5. Sarah Sluis, “Digital Ad Market Soars to $88 Billion, Facebook and Google Contribute 90% of Growth,” AdExchanger, May 10, 2018; James Vincent, “99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS,” Verge, February 16, 2017.

  6. Mark Jamison, “When Did Making Customers Happy Become a Reason for Regulation or Breakup?” AEIdeas, June 8, 2018.

  7. “The Regulatory Case Against Platform Monopolies,” 13D Research, December 4, 2017.

  8. Henry Taylor, “If Social Networks Were Countries, Which Would They Be?” WeForum, April 28, 2016.

  9. Michael J. Mauboussin et al., “The Incredible Shrinking Universe of Stocks,” Credit Suisse, March 22, 2017.

  10. Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan, “Declining Business Dynamism in the United States: A Look at States and Metros,” Brookings Institution, May 5, 2014.

  11. Zoltan Pozsar, “Gobal Money Notes #11,” Credit Suisse, January 29, 2018.

  12. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982).

  13. Rana Foroohar, “Why You Can Thank the Government for Your iPhone,” Time, October 27, 2015.

  14. Author interview with John Battelle in 2017.

  15. Rana Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip on Money and Power,” Financial Times, July 3, 2017.

  16. Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Google, Once Disdainful of Lobbying, Now a Master of Washington,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2014.

  17. Rana Foroohar, “Silicon Valley Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017; Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip.”

  18. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), introductory page.

  19. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015.

  20. Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (New York: Penguin, 2018).

  Chapter 1: A Summary of the Case

  1. Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Eric Schmidt to Leave Alphabet Board, Ending an Era That Defined Google,” The New York Times, April 30, 2019.

  2. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

  3. While I didn’t write about this episode myself at the time, there were a variety of articles published detailing various parts of the meeting, including Hannah Clark’s piece “The Google Guys In Davos” (Forbes, January 26, 2007), as well as one from the Financial Times’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, with whom I now work (“The Exaggerated Reports of the Death of the Newspaper,” Financial Times, March 30, 2007).

  4. Sheila Dang, “Google, Facebook Have Tight Grip on Growing US Online Ad Market,” Reuters, June 5, 2019.

  5. Keach Hagey, Lukas I. Alpert, and Yaryna Serkez, “In News Industry, a Stark Divide Between Haves and Have-Nots,” The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2019.

  6. Judge Richard Leon, memorandum opinion in United States of America v. AT&T Inc., U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, June 12, 2018.

  7. Sheera Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018.

  8. Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018, https://www.edelman.com/​trust-barometer.

  9. Peter Dizikes, “Study: On Twitter, False News Travels Faster than True Stories,” MIT News, March 8, 2018.

  10. Federica Cocco, “Most US Manufacturing Jobs Lost to Technology, Not Trade,” Financial Times, December 2, 2016.

  11. “Populist Insurrections: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Reactions,” G30 Occasional Lecture, YouTube, April 26, 2017.

  12. McKinsey Global Institute, “ ‘Superstars’: The Dynamics of Firms, Sectors, and Cities Leading the Global Economy,” October 2018.

  13. Alex Shephard, “Facebook Has a Genocide Problem,” The New Republic, March 15, 2018.

  14. Edelman Trust Barometer, ibid.

  15. Rana Foroohar, “The Dangers of Digital Democracy,” Financial Times, January 28, 2018.

  16. George Soros, “Remarks Delivered at the World Economic Forum,” January 24, 2019, https://www.georgesoros.com/​2019/​01/​24/​remarks-delivered-at-the-world-economic-forum-2/.

  17. Rana Foroohar, “Facebook’s Data Sharing Shows It Is Not a US Champion,” Financial Times, June 6, 2018.

  18. Kate Conger and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China,” The New York Times, August 16, 2018.

  19. Foroohar, “Facebook’s Data Sharing Shows It Is Not a US Champion.”

  20. Ahmed Al Omran, “Netflix Pulls Episode of Comedy Show in Saudi Arabia,” Financial Times, January 1, 2019.

  21. Issie Lapowsky, “How the LAPD Uses Data to Predict Crime,” Wired, May 22, 2018, https://www.wired.com/​story/​los-angeles-police-department-predictive-policing/.

  22. Mark Harris, “If You Drive in Los Angeles, the Cops Can Track Your Every Move,” Wired, November 13, 2018.

  23. Richard Waters, Shannon Bond, and Hannah Murphy, “Global Regulators’ Net Tightens Around Big Tech,” Financial Times, June 6, 2019, page 14.

  24. Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, and Deflect.”

  25. Jia Lynn Yang and Nina Easton, “Obama and Google (A Love Story),” Fortune, October 26, 2009; Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico Magazine, August 19, 2015; Google Analytics Solutions, “Obama for America Uses Google Analytics to Democratize Rapid, Data-Driven Decision Making,” accessed May 9, 2019, https://analytics.googleblog.com/ [inactive].

  26. Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election.”

  27. Sean Gallagher, “Amazon Pitched Its Facial Recognition to ICE, Released Emails Show,” Ars Technia, October 24, 2018; Andrea Peterson and Jake Laperruque, “Amazon Pushes ICE to Buy Its Face Recognition Surveillance Tech,” Daily Beast, October 23, 2018.

  28. Rana Foroohar, “Release Big Tech’s Grip on Power,” Financial Times, June 18, 2017.

  29. Ibid.

 
; 30. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 363.

  31. ALA News, “Libraries Applaud Dismissal of Google Book Search Case,” American Library Association, November 14, 2013.

  32. Brody Mullins and Jack Nicas, “Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-influence-campaign-1499785286.

  33. Ryan Nakashima, “Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It or Not,” Associated Press, August 13, 2018; Sean Illing, “Cambridge Analytica, the Shady Data Firm That Might Be a Key Trump-Russia Link, Explained,” Vox, April 4, 2018.

  34. Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Caldwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” The New York Times, March 17, 2018.

  35. Camila Domonoske, “Google Announces It Will Stop Allowing Ads for Payday Lenders,” NPR, May 11, 2016.

  36. Rana Foroohar, “Dangers of Digital Democracy,” Financial Times, January 28, 2018.

  37. Rana Foroohar, “Big Tech Must Pay for Access to America’s ‘Digital Oil,’ ” Financial Times, April 7, 2019.

  38. Jennifer Valentino-DeVries et al., “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” The New York Times, December 10, 2018.