Is Europe Targeting Silicon Valley?
It might be a case of jealousy, but there’s no doubt that politicians are trying to put the brakes on the U.S. tech sector, potentially hurting profits.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has cast her views on the subject, while EU regulators were targeting Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) on antitrust allegations. Merkel accused Google and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) of using algorithms that threaten the democratic debate. She wants these two Silicon Valley giants, and others like them, to disclose the mechanisms they use to shape online content. The risk, she says, is that these companies are limiting the number of opinions available to consumers. (Source: “Europe rewrites the rules for Silicon Valley,” Financial Times, November 2, 2016.)
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There is no doubt that large online platforms such as Google, and its algorithms, are crucial. They gather information, or content, from all media. However, Merkel suggests that the secrecy of the process by which Google, Facebook, and other Web giants assemble our digital nourishment presents a risk. The public is unaware of the filter that is at the source. Thus, the content that the public gets may eliminate a variety of different opinions. This presents a deep pitfall for Western democracies. (Source: Ibid)
Merkel doesn’t want to stop Facebook or Google from doing what they do best. She simply urges that they make the algorithms more transparent. Thus, users can become better informed about the kinds of information they get over the Internet. The phenomenon against which Merkel warns has a precise name. It’s called the filter bubble. The bubble filtering was described for the first time in 2011 by the author Eli Pariser. (Source: “Angela Merkel: internet search engines are ‘distorting perception’,” The Guardian, October 28, 2016.)
For example, on Facebook, many of us have hundreds of friends. However, we always see the updates of a small circle that Facebook has chosen for us. Google produces different search results for each query depending on our geographical position. These are the ‘algorithms.’ All this talk is not merely a quest for greater freedom of speech. Silicon Valley suspects that more than jealousy, a protectionist plot is at hand. (Source: Financial Times, op cit.)
Europeans want to get a bigger piece of the marketplace dominated by U.S. companies. So, the algorithms debate might signal a new wave of regulatory and fiscal attacks against the big Silicon Valley firms operating in Europe, from Google to Facebook and Uber International C.V. alike.
