The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it. They however have been successful in covering their ineptitude by diverting the general public’s attention and putting the tech companies in the defendants chair in the public court and this shifting the blame from the government to the tech companies. And then they of course get profited from lobbyist efforts and the huge spend behind them. It all works to the politicians benefits and they can shrink from their responsibility of coming up with same legislation and finish the endless debate , which frankly is getting tiring.
This take isn’t uncommon but I think it’s far too simple. We do have members of Congress with CS degrees but they all have advisors and groups like the Congressional Research Service because nobody is an expert on everything. The problem isn’t lack of knowledge but the fact that this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The lobbyists you mentioned, for example, aren’t like mosquitoes which just show up in DC — companies and industry groups hire them to make sure members of Congress hear their preferences. Some are hired by tech companies, others by their opponents or special interest groups. The tech companies have a ton of money and an enviable reputation as one of the best growth industries for the future so they’ve been very successful at preventing or defanging regulation. That doesn’t mean that people don’t know what’s going on – more commonly, they don’t think it’s a problem, know they don’t have the votes, or have other priorities.
"The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it."
Agreed, and one of the reasons for the failure of policy is the millions of dollars spent by companies like Google and Facebook in lobbying and spreading FUD among politicians and the GP alike.
That said, eventually some remedial laws will have to filter through, as you cannot keep sweeping shit under the carpet and ignoring it forever.
However, that's when the real problems of policing new laws begin, as the long and tortured history of trying to get corporations to comply with laws
repeatedly attests. Cigarette companies deliberately lying and obfuscating the truth about the dangers of cigarettes for decades is a quintessential example.
The only surefire way of resolving this is to simultaneously legislate that company employees are equally liable under the law for a company's violations of the law. This would mean that employees would be in violation of the law if they engaged in or formulated company policies that violated the law or if they learned about such violations and did nothing about them.
In essence, as employees could no longer hide behind corporate structures, self preservation would kick in and to save themselves from possible prosecution they would make the company's wrongdoing public. (There is little doubt that this would be very effective law if penalties were high enough.)
The fact that laws aren't already properly framed in this way shows how successful corporate influence has been on government policy up until now.
If citizens feel sufficiently strongly about this then they'll be politically motivated to do something about it. Personally, I find it very odd that there hasn't been a general call from the citizenry along these lines long ago.
The fact that all past blustering about corporate misbehavior has amounted to essentially nothing and that there has been no change of any significe along these lines to remedy matters tells me that either the general public doesn't really care sufficiently about the issue and or that too many people own shares in corpations and thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
