Should Congress Crack Down on Big Tech?

TIM BRAY, FORMER AMAZON VICE PRESIDENT: A couple things stand out. One is that Microsoft isn’t there. That seems weird to me. The second is, one thing that just stuck out to me is that Representative Sensenbrenner spoke of America’s consumers and conservatives are consumers too. And that attitude troubles me a bit. Would I hope that Americans are more than just consumers, they are citizens, is they are creators, they are more interesting than that. Having said that, I have some optimism the committee hearings will move the needle in a positive direction.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, Shoshana, you’ve been writing about this for a long time and studying it for decades, as we said. Do you share the optimism that it could move the needle? And I guess, do you share the idea, the question, the fundamental question, that this tech sector is just too big?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF, AUTHOR, “THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM”: Well, I’m glad you started off with that introduction from Congressman Cicilline. When I heard it, I was scribbling down those same words, emperors of the online economy. So, here’s the good news and the bad news, are they emperors? Yes. They are the emperors of surveillance empires that exercise total control over the world’s information. Unfortunately, none of that is an overstatement. Where Congressman Cicilline understates is that this is no longer constrained to the online economy. That might have been a true statement 10 years ago. Right now, the surveillance economics that has made these once-fledgling start-ups into huge surveillance empires in just 20 years, they are — they have this surveillance economic logic has gone way beyond the online world, way beyond the tech sector and essentially now is dominating every domain of the conventional economy to such an extent that these empires have indeed become audacious. And their long game, as I really believe it to be from all of these years of study, is that they see themselves going head to head with democracy, undermining and trampling individual rights and creating a society based on such an extreme concentration of knowledge and the unaccountable power that goes with that knowledge, that it is simply no longer consistent with the aims of a democratic society. That — undertaking that challenge, can we create a digital future that is safe for democracy? That’s the work that begins today, but it will not end today.