The technology industry has an increasingly complex relationship to government and politics, most importantly in three areas: Privacy and surveillance. Censorship. Antitrust, general economic regulation, and other competition management. Here’s some of what I think about that, plus links to a lot more. 1. For a long time, I’ve maintained: Privacy and surveillance are very big deals. Ultimately, they cannot be handled effectively without direct regulation of specific permitted and forbidden uses of data. The first point is now widely accepted. The second unfortunately is not; laws and regulatio ..read more

0. Most observers hold several or all of the views: “Fake news” and the like are severe problems. Algorithmic solutions have not worked well to date. Neither have manual ones. Trusting governments to censor is a bad idea. In light of the previous points, trusting large social media corporations to censor is a bad idea too. Educating consumers to evaluate news and opinions accurately would be … difficult. And further: Whatever you think of the job traditional journalistic organizations previously did as news arbiters, they can’t do it as well anymore, for a variety of economic, structural and s ..read more