As CEOs of some of the world’s biggest companies testify before the United States Senate, we hear a … [+]
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We are currently witnessing tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon under a powerful spotlight, and it seems like a day of reckoning is coming soon. It all feels like a movie that we have all seen before during the Bell breakup in the 80s and the Microsoft antitrust lawsuits in the 90s. In this two-part article series, we will examine the challenges consumers face with tech giants, the potential consequences for inaction, and strategies that these tech giants can implement to get back on track.
With the potential repeal of Section 230 staring the industry down the face, it seems inevitable that changes must be made. As CEOs of some of the world’s biggest companies testify before the United States Senate, we hear a lot about free speech suppression, monopolies, and anti-competitive behaviors. It sounds familiar because we lived this conversation in the prior decades all the way back to the 18th century “robber barons.”
While I won’t weigh into these allegations here, I will fault the tech giants for partly bringing this calamity onto themselves by allowing lax security on their platforms. Major tech companies kept turning a blind eye to fundamental security and authentication issues, creating a massive “noise” problem and lack of authenticity.
Bots Everywhere
Everywhere you turn, bots, troll farms, and malfeasance are affecting almost every service. For instance, search engines are famous for people that try to game the system and make illegitimate profit by sending bot traffic to sites. On social media, services such as Facebook face a whopping 16% “certified” fake or duplicate account rate. Reddit is a lot like the Wild West with fake and duplicate accounts all over the place. Twitter is also rife with bot problems, with thousands and thousands of fake and bot accounts found there regularly.
Lack of Authenticity Leads to Abandonment
When you think about social media, the point behind it all is that people want to connect to other “real” people. Scripted bots were never a part of the social media contract—ever! It is, however, a major reality that users face today. Unless corrected, this leads us to one possible fate for the tech giants that bring us the social tools we live with and use every day. That fate is abandonment, and it will arrive for a couple of reasons. People universally don’t like their speech suppressed and they don’t like to be bullied or followed or drowned out by things that are not real.
No One is Invincible
On the other hand, look at all the ramifications of what these technologies have become. The social platforms have become the arbiters of news and they have taken on an uncomfortable (for us) position of telling us what is real, contested, or partially inaccurate. Along with their market monopolies and dominance, the way these companies are parading around explaining things to Congress seems to lead to an imminent destiny with mandated dissolution. Again, no one is invisible. Some of the biggest companies in history have faced this, going back to Standard Oil, AT&T, American Tobacco, and more. Microsoft somehow survived similar efforts twenty years ago and ultimately had to settle its way out of courtrooms across the world. Even if a company survives, an antitrust case can take years to play out and cost millions upon millions in legal costs and brand damage.
Lessons to be Learned
In the hosting and cloud industry, we figured out long ago that we must enable the storage of information and the exchange of data, and we need to provide access to this information wherever you are. We viewed ourselves as a platform. It may sound unsexy, but it worked. We aim to do that in an increasingly more efficient, more secure, and more valuable way. We deal with illegal content accordingly, partnering with law enforcement and industry groups, and by aligning with the sort of clients we want to do work with.
Ultimately, we enable people and companies, and when web industries set on this course, we were able to make big things possible, including the foundation of the very same companies we consider giants of the industry today. With rare exception, the line between platform and information publishing never crossed.
In part two of my series, we will look at ways tech giants can get back on track through authentication and stronger security postures— but no matter what, it is time for a change.
