I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here.
I come here as someone who has spent an entire professional lifetime involved in Silicon Valley building the best and brightest companies. The core thing I want you to understand is that the culture of Silicon Valley has come completely off the rails and that the technology industry today is committed to monopoly. It is committed to, as Professor Zuboff will describe, a form of capitalism that would be foreign to any of us who have grown up in the last 50 years.
In my mind, the industry has demonstrated that it is not capable of governing itself and that, left to its own devices, it will, as a matter of course, create harms that cannot easily be remedied. As a consequence, I believe it is imperative that this committee and nations around the world engage in a new thought process relative to the ways that we're going to control companies in Silicon Valley, especially to look at their business models.
The core issue that I would point to here, relative to business models, is that, by nature, they invade privacy, and that, by nature, they undermine democracy. There is no way to stop that without ending the business practices as they exist. I believe the only example we have seen of a remedy that has a chance of success is the one implemented by Sri Lanka recently when it chose to shut down the platforms in response to a terrorist act. I believe that is the only way governments are going to gain enough leverage in order to have reasonable conversations.
My remarks tomorrow will go into that in more depth.
I want to thank you for this opportunity. I want you to understand that I will be available to any of you at any time to give you the benefit of my 35 years inside Silicon Valley so you understand what it is we're up against.
Thank you very much.