The
day of reckoning for Big Tech is upon us. Technology companies swung and missed
at repeated opportunities over the past decade to work with the federal
government on regulations to ensure consumer privacy and fair competition. They
had a chance to address the issues and they failed.
So
we move to the next, inevitable step: the federal government’s announcement
recently that it will conduct an antitrust investigation of Facebook, Google,
Apple and Amazon.
Now
the stakes are much higher. The industry’s past foot-dragging means that it now
faces a real threat that the feds could act unilaterally — and stifle
innovation in the process.
It’s
a serious risk. Raise your hand if you think the folks at the Department of
Justice and the Federal Trade Commission understand what drives the innovation
economy. That’s what we thought. Yet these are the people who will be drawing
up the rules the tech industry will play by in the years ahead.
Let’s
hope they don’t forget that innovation is at the heart of our economic growth.
Our ability to remain a world power requires that we maintain a technological
edge over China and our other global competitors.
That
won’t be easy. The Chinese government is investing $300 billion in an effort to
dominate the fields of green energy, green vehicles, robotics, medicine and
artificial intelligence. Its goal is to overcome the United States’
technological advantage by 2025. Any serious disruption in the way the U.S.
tech industry operates could have costly, unintended consequences on our
ability to maintain our advantage.
Whatever
the federal government does, it must maintain incentives for U.S. tech firms to
keep spending on research and development, which is one of their primary tools
to evolve and prepare for the future.
Tech
leads U.S. companies in research and development spending. Amazon ($14.1
billion), Google ($10.15 billion), Apple ($7.65 billion) and Facebook ($4.76
billion) were among the top 10 investors in R&D in 2018. They are using
those billions as a strategic weapon to win what could accurately be described
as the World War of Artificial Intelligence.
Time
is of the essence. The digital landscape of 2030 is likely to be fundamentally
different than it is today. After all, consider how fast it’s changed in the
past dozen years. As recently as 2007, MySpace dominated the social networking
landscape, receiving more than 70 percent of all visits to social networks.
Facebook, which was only three years old, was a distant second.
That
same year, IBM created Watson, its artificial intelligence system. Apple
released the iPhone, Airbnb was founded, and Twitter had just gone global.
Google had yet to release its Android system and Amazon was still finding its
way on the cloud-computing scene.
Those
companies launched a wave of innovation that helped the United States emerge
from the 2008 financial crisis and create what has been the longest bull market
in history. Unfortunately, Big Tech’s
dominance over those years has led to abuses that deserve greater federal
regulation.
A
guest editorial
