Government can’t keep up with technology’s growth
How do you regulate a business you don’t understand? It’s a problem the U.S. government has not resolved or even faced, said experts at a Harvard Kennedy School forum on Wednesday, and until it does, big technology’s power “to shape our politics and even our public policy” will continue to grow unchecked. “Anyone who’s been paying attention to news in the past year or so has woken up to the power of digital platforms and large technology companies,” said Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and moderator of “Big Tech and Democracy.” Just as bad, “if you asked members of Congress to articulate the problem, you’d get a wide range of views,” he said. Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford said the largest tech companies are already powerful enough to have their own infrastructures, from Amazon’s private internet service to the health care systems now in...