Policy Reforms Toolkit
Diagnosing Harms of Asymmetrical Power
As a society, we’ve normalized digital lawlessness in the name of innovation and disruption. We need guardrails that protect the conditions that democracy needs to thrive: a comprehensively educated public, a citizenry that can check the power of market forces and bind predatory behavior.
Dr. Shoshana Zuboff warns of four areas of asymmetric power that technology companies wield over democratic societies in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
🕵️ ASYMMETRIC KNOWLEDGE & INFORMATION: “Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us.”
🦾 ASYMMETRIC CAPACITY & CONTROL: “The essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us.”
🏰 ASYMMETRIC SIZE & SCALE: “Hyperscale firms have become emblematic of modern digital capitalism, and as capitalist inventions they present significant social and economic challenges, including their impact on employment and wages, industry concentration, and monopoly.”
💰 ASYMMETRIC RESOURCES: “The rules of the game have been transformed into something that is both unprecedented and unimaginable outside the digital milieu and the vast resources of wealth and scientific prowess that the new applied utopianists bring to the table.”
We can craft policy to address these asymmetries of power under the following themes. The ideas shared here are meant to be directional and not comprehensive. If you have questions or comments, please let us know. Our small team gets a lot of requests so forgive us if we are not able to respond directly.
Top Ideas by Theme
Mechanisms:
- Big Tobacco-style publicly funded awareness and literacy campaign (e.g. 1990’s :truth campaign)
- Better ID verification to identify minors for access to services + age-appropriate design
- Health authorities to help draft guidelines for tech on fostering healthy child development
- Preventing & combating technology/screen addiction
- Kid-friendly default settings to limit notifications, limit infinite scrolling, warning labels
- Restore "Saturday morning cartoon" level protections for kids and advertising
Existing/proposed measures:
- The Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act (US)
- KIDS Act (US)
- The Kids PRIVCY Act (US)
- PROTECT Kids Act (US)
- Age Appropriate Design Code (UK)
- eSafety Commissioner (Australia)
- Expert Group on Safer Internet for Children (EU)
Mechanisms:
- Comprehensive federal privacy legislation including a private right of action, do-not-track by default, do-not-sell by default
- Ban data brokers
- Expanded FTC authority + leaning into the “Unfairness” doctrine
Existing/proposed measures:
- The DATA Act (US)
- ePrivacy Regulation (EU forthcoming)
- California Privacy Rights Act
Mechanisms:
- Mandatory transparency libraries & tools, including user-friendly APIs
- Political ads transparency, including purchaser identity & price transparency
- Scale-related transparency requirements (e.g., recommendation rates for videos, groups, posts)
Existing/proposed measures:
- Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) (US)
- The Social Media DATA Act (US)
- Honest Ads Act (US)
- DASHBOARD Act (US)
- Filter Bubble Transparency Act (US)
- Restore the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) - like an “early warning system”
Mechanisms:
- Consider fiduciary obligations + duties of care
- Establish acceptable risk ratios/safe operating thresholds for social platforms (as we do with bank reserve ratios), tying responsibility with increasing risk. For example: content moderation, safe/unsafe virality ratios and recommendation systems, #trending topics, fake accounts of total accounts, unsafe, unaccountable variations of split-testing, advertising
- Slow down or disable unsafe platform functions (J&J removing tampered Tylenol from shelf)
- Incentives to audit high-risk algorithms (aka “FDA” for Algorithms, per Coded Bias)
Existing/proposed measures:
- Consider Section 230 reforms focused on tying liability to amplification/virality
- Expand the FTC’s supervisory and rulemaking authority
- Expand the FCC’s broadcast regulatory authority over social media-based comms/news
- Apple/Google gatekeeper liability (EU)
- Online Harms Bill (UK)
- Pass the Algorithmic Accountability Act (US)
- Pass the “Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act” (US)
- Accountable & Equitable AI (Algorithmic Justice League)
- Adopt CorrectTheRecord / transparency / recall / notification mechanisms for take-downs
- Global Disinformation Index risk ratings of media sources
Mechanisms:
- Publicly funded programs for people to know themselves better than tech knows our weaknesses
- Protect rights to “cognitive liberty”
- Ban behavioral advertising & microtargeting/hyper-personalization (allow contextual ads only)
- Combating dark patterns & preventing experimentation on users
- Rules/limits on real-time bidding (RTB)
- Responsibility to prevent foreign interference & manipulation via states or state-sanctioned actors
- Responsibility to take down coordinated bot networks, automated accounts
Existing/proposed measures:
- SMART Act (US)
- DETOUR Act (US)
- Right to object to automated processing (EU - GDPR)
- Direct Marketing Code of Practice (UK)
Mechanisms:
- Prevent data silos & co-mingling across platforms (per German federal court decision)
- Prevent mergers that inhibit competition/choice (e.g., vertical integrations)
- Ex ante regulations
Existing/proposed measures:
- ACCESS Act
- Formal antitrust investigation into Facebook and Google
- Digital Services Act online gatekeeper legislation (EU)
- Competition Tool (EU)
Mechanisms:
- Closing existing loopholes (e.g., mandating legal establishment of a business where it operates)
- Passing legislation to tax digital services
- Fund/subsidize conventional media/publishers through a tax on big tech
- Digital advertising taxes
Existing/proposed measures:
- Code of conduct for digital platforms (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission)
- Digital Services tax (UK)
Mechanisms:
- Mandate registration by foreign agents + penalties for state-sponsored foreign interference
- Establish effective oversight authority & mechanisms
- Expand the GIFCT (Global Internet Forum to Counter-Terrorism) to cover additional categories
- Early warning systems to identify cross-platform coordinated activity
- Better authentication mechanisms
- Better cooperation protocols between public/private sector
Existing/proposed measures
- Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA - US Department of Justice)
