Tech Giants Promise to Heal Themselves But the Internet Was Built to Hate

This excerpt is from an article by Harry Siegel that first appeared in The Daily Beast.

The self-serve, untouched-by-human-hands model is meant to give giant ad companies plausible deniability about what it is they’re selling—and who they’re selling it to. It wasn’t us, just our code!

The good news is that the public and media are finally catching up with what Joel Kotkin and others have been warning for years now about the danger of tech oligarchs with market shares the robber barons of the 19th century would envy. If we really want to restore America confidence, we’re overdue for a new era of trust busting.

Just imagine what real news outlets could do to combat “fake news” if Facebook and Google weren’t sucking up all the money that could go into actual reporting while making absurd noises after the election about fixing the problems they’ve created in the hopes that it’s not too late to keep their largely unregulated gravy trains rolling.

Or what companies and codemakers could do to protect our data if they actually gave a damn about doing that, and not just mitigating the p.r. damage after the latest, inevitable leak.

Read the full article at The Daily Beast.