Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Says Tech Companies Can Regulate Themselves (yahoo.com) 128
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a new interview rejected the notion that Capitol Hill has a role to play in regulating big tech companies, breaking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent willingness to work with lawmakers. From a report: "The problem is if you write a rule, inevitably, you fix the solution on a specific solution, but the technology moves so quickly," Schmidt says. "It's generally better to let the tech companies do these things," he adds. Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011, acknowledged that over his tenure the company did not understand the scale or severity of problems originating from its products. But since then, the company has addressed the issues, he said. "Our response has, in my view, been very strong," he said. "Today, we have all sorts of software that enforces policies of one kind or another. And people complain about the rules, but the fact of the matter is the rules are published."
[...] Schmidt suggested that even if Congress does pass new regulations on tech companies, issues will continue to originate on tech platforms because the sites display unpredictable human conduct. Content moderators and other employees need to ensure that users abide by the rules of a given platform, he said. "All of these platforms that are human centric will have to have a component of them, which is...watching what the users are doing and making sure they're consistent with their terms of service and the law," he says. "These issues are ongoing, because these are human-based systems," he says. "And so humans will continue to use them. They will continue to do unexpected things. There will continue to be surprises." Further reading: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China.
[...] Schmidt suggested that even if Congress does pass new regulations on tech companies, issues will continue to originate on tech platforms because the sites display unpredictable human conduct. Content moderators and other employees need to ensure that users abide by the rules of a given platform, he said. "All of these platforms that are human centric will have to have a component of them, which is...watching what the users are doing and making sure they're consistent with their terms of service and the law," he says. "These issues are ongoing, because these are human-based systems," he says. "And so humans will continue to use them. They will continue to do unexpected things. There will continue to be surprises." Further reading: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China.
Should, not could (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Should, not could (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a matter if they could, but whether they should be allowed to.
It's also a matter of if they do. So far, experience has come down on the side of "sure, they can, but they don't really most of the time."
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It's not a matter if they could, but whether they should be allowed to.
It's also a matter of if they do. So far, experience has come down on the side of "sure, they can, but they don't really most of the time."
They would make drug dealers look like a church mission if we let them.
Unfortunately with the banking industry, we already do, which IMHO needs far more regulating than tech does.
Re: Should, not could (Score:2)
They would make drug dealers look like a church mission...
You are hereby charged with analogizing while stupid.
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Nah, this is pretty much right on.
My drug dealer doesn't try to fuck me. Customer service and repeat business are important in his line of work.
The tech industry just assumes you won't go anywhere else. And they may be right.
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This points up one of the fundamental flaws in libertarians' sophistry.
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A companies job is to maximize profits. Oddly enough some self regulating policies help meet the goal of maximizing profits. So for Google, who makes money off of selling ads, means the services they give to the end users need to have a good degree of trust behind them. Otherwise there user base will drop and not be able to sell ads, because people won't buy ad space to a service that doesn't have a lot of people. However ethics are part of a long term strategic plan, companies, especially publicly traded
Re:Should, not could (Score:4, Informative)
A companies job is to maximize profits.
I see you've never created or led a company.
A company's job is to do whatever it promised to do in its articles of incorporation and the information it gave to initial shareholders. In most cases this at least includes generating profits, but not always, and not necessarily as the primary goal.
Re: Should, not could (Score:2)
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It's not a matter if they could, but whether they should be allowed to.
Furthermore, these companies already do regulate themselves by default. On all issues, the company decides to pursue a particular option, to decline all options, or to not consider the issue. A company cannot exist without making such decisions, and that constitutes de facto self-regulation. That's not a question at all. The questions are whether the company should be held to standards that support societal interests that may be in opposition to the interests of that one company and whether the company
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^This
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So you get a guy like Schmidt, who couldn't rise at Sun, then couldn't rise at Novell, finally finding himself screwing up Google so badly that privacy will never be the same--- waxing eloquent about how companies can police themselves. Bullshit.
Google has the oil well of ads. It can't keep a business unit going for more than three years unless it's based on ads. How many different Google projects left people in a ditch? Ask the people that believed in Google Fiber. Or Google +. There are whole websites bas
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But they hired Schmidt, whose vomitus spewed lies and deceit, IMHO. "Do No Evil" became "Fuck Your Privacy". His entire energy fed from the thoughts of killing Microsoft, who he hated. Not quite single handedly, he killed Novell's future, and turned Google into the morass it is today, starting the solidification of what some call "The Surveillance Economy".
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It's not a matter if they could, but whether they should be allowed to.
Exactly. All someone has to do is look up the role of Enron concerning deregulation of the California Power Market back in the early 2000s. There is no such thing as 'self-regulation' concerning where humans are involved.
There will always be some greedy fuck trying to game the system to his/her advantage. Always has, always will.
Government is too slow (Score:2)
The issue with having Governments regulating Tech companies is that Government is far too slow. Issues in tech change faster than most companies are able to pass laws. Not to mention the fact that shackling your own Tech companies with ineffective laws would yes probably slow them down but at the same time you'd risk losing your business to another country's company who may not be under those restrictions.
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UK seems to be doing a somewhat decent job at it.
Passing no laws means the tech companies do what they want. Read the article below about facebook.
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The internet has been blowing up about this for a week now:
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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Pornography is a good example of how it's not trivial. You're not required to be honest on the Internet so the only way to verify age is to use a third party. Porn sites that you had to pay to access had a reasonable 3rd party, credit cards aren't often issued to minors so you prevent a large number of children from accessing the site unless they pilfer their parent's cards, but there was no similar 3rd party for a free site which was reliant entirely on the honesty of the individual attempting to access th
Re: Government is too slow (Score:2)
The trouble is governments of both major parties have tried to bring in national ID cards and folded under the backlash. Perhaps this is actually an attempt to slowly open a back door for ID cards, because the government machine are desperate for them but can't get the masses on-board.
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But slow is usually better than nothing.
If we (voters) want faster service from gov't, we can vote in people who will put more resources into it.
For example, people often complain about the long lines at state DMV's (for vehicle registration/licensing), but don't want to be taxed/fee'd more to hire more staff to make the lines shorter. Magic doesn't exist: pay or wait.
Example?
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" faster than most companies are able to pass laws"
Freudian slip or...???
Re: Government is too slow (Score:2)
The sad fact is that for the most part "regulation" isn't in the public interest, but rather a barrier to competition paid for by the industry being regulated. Regulatory capture.
Even the FDA begun ostensibly to keep our food and drugs safe... relies on big pharma to tell it what is safe and then we suddenly find tens of thousands of people dying from prescription opioids and people are resorting to illegal drugs of dubious qualities because the most effective pain killers have been made too expensive by t
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That's why it's important that laws are written clearly, in terms of outcomes and penalties, not tied up too much into the specific technical details, because when the laws are written too narrowly companies can engineer a way past the law. Look, for example, at the definition of Common Carrier in the Communications Act if 1934 - well written, and works well no matter what technology is used to provide the service. That is, until in 2017 the FCC decided to reclassify ISPs to not be considered Common Carrier
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That's a great excuse, but it doesn't really mean much. Regulations on the kind of information you can collect, how you store it, what you can do with it, and who you can sell it to, are pretty independent of "tech changing too fast." There's also the approach of a non-legislative regulator (like the FAA or FCC) if more flexibility is really required.
This "tech changes too fast" thing is a bit questionable too. Google, Facebook and company have had much the same business plan for a couple of decades now.
In other news: Eric is full of Schmidt (Score:2)
https://search.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
Comment removed (Score:3)
CELEBCRACY (Score:3)
America is a CELEBCRACY. If you are famous, you can do just about anything. After all, as Robert Heinlein said:
The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.
Merit has little to do with this.
I think you're missing something (Score:2)
I can't find the study but somebody took thousands of bills across the country, ran t
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Ok, then what about these people:
Al Franken (Democrat) (U.S. Senator, Minnesota)
Alan Autry (Republican) (Mayor of Fresno, California)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Republican) (Governor of California)
Ben Jones (Democrat) (U.S. Congressman, 4th District of Georgia)
Clay Aiken (Democrat) (lost congressional election in 2nd District of North Carolina)
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America is a CELEBCRACY. If you are famous, you can do just about anything. After all, as Robert Heinlein said:
The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.
Merit has little to do with this.
I find it humorous that an entertainer is being quoted about how entertainers being mistaken for people of importance.
Why not? Look at the aviation industry... (Score:2)
Look at the aviation industry. They have been left to self-regulate many parts of aircraft manufacture and approval. I am sure no aircraft manufacturer would design a plane that just, ... err ..., never mind.
History (Score:5, Insightful)
"Can" self-regulate, yes.
But based on hundreds of years of history, most will not. Why should we expect the pattern of owner and executive behavior be different now? Humans didn't change.
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That's the exception, not the rule. Threatening to regulate an industry may encourage them to self-regulate to some degree, but the threat has to have teeth to be effective; and those teeth come from following through with regulation of recent flakers rather than just giving lip service and slaps on the wrist.
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No they don't, because consumers are idiots and in the case technology they are addicts. Remind me again how phones designed to fail and system obsolesce benefit consumers again? They don't. But consumers don't vote them out because they want the newest phones.
Oh sure, companies provide some sort of benefit to consumers but that doesn't mean companies which aren't beneficial overall go out of business. In fact most of the largest companies objectively do more harm than good.
Yeah (Score:2)
Take your pick (Score:2)
If you don't regulate them, they will screw everyone over. If you do regulate them, they will abuse loopholes that they pay law makers to have written into the regulations and screw everyone over. See: the tax code.
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Great idea. You certainly do have some sort of objective standard to test against in mind, right?
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OK, let's make all autonomous car software developers get a certification for the latest NIST self-driving car standards.
Oh, wait... they don't exist yet. I guess that we'll need the first company who gets a level 5 autonomous vehicle safely on the road to write one... which basically means that we're expecting at least that technology company to regulate itself.
do both (Score:2)
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does Eric Schmidt's opinion matter here?
Sure. (Score:2)
The problem is, they don't.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
I seem to recall coal, oil, and gas companies, airline manufacturers, chemical companies, banks, and Wall Street firms, to name a few, who have said they can regulate themselves.
Look at how well those have worked out. No pollution in our land or water and a financial system which needs no help from the taxpayers to keep running.
Utter BULLSHIT! (Score:1)
Businesses cannot self-regulate.
In a free market the regulation must come from the consumers in their purchasing or consumption decisions. In the absence of this regulation it must then come from government, however this form of regulation is usual inferior and often enough counter productive as it results in governments just getting into bed with the businesses and making it harder for consumers to perform their own types of regulation.
I am tired of the bullshit claims that businesses can self-regulation
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No one knows everything. But you can find out more than enough information to make mostly informed decisions to make a real impact.
"Seriously, what you are saying is not reality."
Yea, if you are lazy.
"What exactly do you think a government is for?"
It is for "controlling" people exactly like you. That is exactly what is is for. It is working as well. Government has killed, murdered, oppressed, and destroyed more people, places, and things then all war and disaster has combined.
Libertarianism is Narcissism writ large (Score:1)
You really think a lot about yourself, don't you.
Most Narcissists do, and Libertarianism is to Narcissists what catnip is to cats. The axioms embedded in that philosophy are driven by fundamental axioms of Narcissism. ("Everybody is motivated by greed and nothing else," "there is no such thing as altruism," "everyone is only self-serving" etc. etc. True for Narcissists and almost no one else).
A Venn diagram of Libertarian thought and Narcissism is a circle.
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You and I can make a real impact... I'm sure facebook and amazon are quaking in their boots at the thought of people like you... that do the research and determine if you want to do business with them or not based on your values...
I'm sure that's what they work to do, reach out to grab the .001% of customers that make their purchaases with their values and concerns. I'm sure they really sweat that, rather than focus on the 85% that make their decision based on lowest price, or the 14% that decide based on
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Here's the big problem though "Informed Decision Making". How the hell do we get that.
first of all, companies rarely offer more information than they are mandated by law. So how are people supposed to say organize and boycott google or facebook for their massive data collection, when at the end of the day, they wouldn't know what all the companies collect, we wouldn't know if and when they started and stopped, we just make assumptions based on how accurate our ads seem to be
Then comes the second problem,
And we should beleive him because... (Score:3)
... why? Because he was a CEO? Please pardon me for not accepting his BS.
They *Could* (Score:2)
But they won't, at least not in a manner that's effective from the perspective of the average person.
Greed gets in the way.
Not possible (Score:2)
No one whether its an individual or a organization can regulate themselves. Its not possible.
Google needs to be broken up (Score:1)
1,000 pieces.
So does Apple
So does Facebook
Sorry Microsoft, you are 1990's evil.
Why does Eric Schmidt hate Adam Smith? (Score:2)
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary." Adam Smith, _The Wealth Of Nations_, Book IV Chapter VIII
Is this joke? (Score:2)
Like all for-profit, public companies, those in the tech sector have a fiduciary duty to maximize their profit for their shareholders. Presumably within the law, although many obviously take that only as a recommendation. Thus, they will regulate themselves if, and only if, that improves their profit. Or, more accurately, any self-regulation will be applied with that goal in mind, first and foremost.
So, no, Mr. Schmidt; we do not think so.
In related news (Score:2)
Former serial killer Dennis Rader, better knows as the BTK, says that serial killers can regulate themselves.
Hens, meet your new guard (Score:2)
It's not B.S. at all. He's right. But .... (Score:2)
The problem is, self-regulation of for-profit business means there's always the incentive to make a choice that benefits your own company at the expense of everyone else in the general population.
On the flip-side though? When government tries to write regulations, it has the exact problem Schmidt outlines. It's a slow process of getting legislation agreed upon by hundreds of folks in the House and the Senate. Or even at a local level, you may have to write rules up and get them put to a vote at a future dat
Nah (Score:2)
They can't, they really really REALLY can't.
And how many people die when Regulate Themselves? (Score:2)
And how many people die when Regulate Themselves?
Uber is at 1
Boeing 346
No, you can't. (Score:2)
Because where money / profits are involved, self-regulation and / or self- policing becomes irrelevant.
This is true of all things because, in most of the World, the accumulation of Wealth supersedes everything else.
This is where the saying " Everyone has a price " comes into play.
bullshit. (Score:2)
No, they can't. (Score:2)
Self censorship? (Score:1)
Who gets to call for such bans? France? China? Spain? Germany? A lawyer? A law firm? A cult? A faith? A movie studio? A number of lawyers working for a NGO?
A lawyer in German who has the legal duty in Germany to remove content globally so no other German can see the content that is not legal in Germany?
The maker of software DRM? NATO? A political think tank with people who used to work for NATO?
A SJW NGO?