Thank you, co-chairs Zimmer and Collins, and committee members, for having me. I have to say it's a real honour to be here with you and amongst these other panellists.
I'm particularly heartened, though, because even three years ago, I think a meeting like this would have seemed unnecessary to many in the public, the media, the technology sector and by governments themselves. However, now I would suggest that we're in an entirely different policy moment. I want to make five observations about this policy space that we're in right now.
The first point I want to make is that it's pretty clear that self-regulation and even many of the forms of co-regulation that are being discussed have proven and will continue to prove to be insufficient for this problem. The financial incentives are simply powerfully aligned against meaningful reform. These are publicly traded, largely unregulated companies, which shareholders and directors expect growth by maximizing a revenue model that is itself part of the problem. This growth may or may not be aligned with the public interest.
The second point I want to make is that this problem is not one of bad actors but one of structure. Disinformation, hate speech, election interference, privacy breaches, mental health issues and anti-competitive behaviour must be treated as symptoms of the problem, not its cause. Public policy should therefore focus on the design and the incentives embedded in the design of the platforms themselves.
It is the design of the attention economy which incentivizes virality and engagement over reliable information. It is the design of the financial model of surveillance capitalism, which we'll hear much more about, which incentivizes data accumulation and its use to influence our behaviour. It is the design of group messaging which allows for harmful speech and even the incitement of violence to spread without scrutiny. It is the design for global scale that is incentivized in perfect automation solutions to content filtering, moderation and fact-checking. It is the design of our unregulated digital economy that has allowed our public sphere to become monopolized.
If democratic governments determine that this structure and this design is leading to negative social and economic outcomes, as I would argue it is, then it is their responsibility to govern.
The third point I would make is that governments that are taking this problem seriously, many of which are included here, are all converging I think on a markedly similar platform governance agenda. This agenda recognizes that there are no silver bullets to this broad set of problems we're talking about. Instead, policies must be domestically implemented and internationally coordinated across three categories: content policies which seek to address a wide range of both supply and demand issues about the nature, amplification and legality of content in our digital public sphere; data policies which ensure that public data is used for the public good and that citizens have far greater rights over the use, mobility and monetization of their data; and competition policies which promote free and competitive markets in the digital economy.
That's the platform governance agenda.
The fourth point I want to make is that the propensity when discussing this agenda to over-complicate solutions serves the interests of the status quo. I think there are many sensible policies that could and should be implemented immediately. The online ad micro-targeting market could be made radically more transparent, and in many cases suspended entirely. Data privacy regimes could be updated to provide far greater rights to individuals, and greater oversight and regulatory power to punish abuses. Tax policy could be modernized to better reflect the consumption of digital goods and to crack down on tax base erosion and profit-sharing. Modernized competition policy could be used to restrict and roll back acquisitions and to separate platform ownership from application and product development. Civic media can be supported as a public good, and large-scale and long-term civic literacy and critical thinking efforts can be funded at scale by national governments, not by private organizations.
That few of these have been implemented is a problem of political will, not of policy or technical complexity.
Finally, though, and the fifth point I want to make is that there are policy questions for which there are neither easy solutions, meaningful consensus nor appropriate existing international institutions, and where there may be irreconcilable tensions between the design of the platforms and the objectives of public policy.
The first is on how we regulate harmful speech in a digital public sphere. At the moment, we've largely outsourced the application of national laws as well as the interpretation of difficult trade-offs between free speech and personal and public harms to the platforms themselves: companies that seek solutions, rightly in their perspective, that can be implemented at scale globally. In this case, I would argue that what is possible technically and financially for the companies might be insufficient for the goals of the public good, or the public policy goals.
The second issue is liable for content online. We've clearly moved beyond the notion of platform neutrality and absolute safe harbour, but what legal mechanisms are best suited to holding platforms, their design and those who run them accountable?
Finally, as artificial intelligence increasingly shapes the character and economy of our digital public sphere, how are we going to bring these opaque systems into our laws, norms and regulations?
In my view, these difficult conversations, as opposed to what I think are the easier policies that can be implemented, should not be outsourced to the private sector. They need to be led by democratically accountable governments and their citizens, but this is going to require political will and policy leadership, precisely what I think this committee represents.
Thank you very much.