Balance regulation and competitiveness

The FTC must balance to make sure that the competitiveness of domestic platform operators is not compromised while ensuring protection for children.

Multinational social media and streaming giants like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Alphabet-owned YouTube and TikTok have been leveraging and harvesting “vast surveillance” for profit-making, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded.

In the 129-page report on 13 social media and streaming platforms run by 9 big-tech majors based on an investigation of their data collection and usage practices across nearly four years, the U.S. antitrust agency discovered that most of them collected and stockpiled personal and demographic data by age, sex and language with some of them digging up private information on income, education and marital status of their users to retain them for an indefinite period.

They inferred individual features by feeding passively gathered information from videos, photo uploads or text exchanges through an algorithm, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

They were able to build up an algorithm to personalize ads and keep consumers glued to their services with “an ever-more invasive method of collection” in order to “monetize” to the tune of billions of dollars a year, said FTC Chair Lina Khan. The finding makes clear that “self-regulation has been a failure,” wrote FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine, arguing they should “no longer let the fox guard the henhouse.”

Before the FTC report, Instagram announced a new privacy plan for teenagers to shift their accounts to a private mode. In that setting, an account holder under 18 must approve followers to see, like or comment on their posts to keep theft or crime at bay. IT tycoons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are known to have regulated their children’s smartphone usage. Korea must hasten pertinent regulations to protect children and teenagers as they are known to spend the most time on social media and online platforms.

While toughening protection for minors, our response to big-tech platforms must be clear-headed. Europe’s restrictions are mostly aimed at fostering their non-existent market against U.S. giants. The big-tech regulation pushed by the Biden administration only earned criticism for killing the domestic industry. Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) in its outline for the Platform Fair Competition Act proposes temporary sanctions to quicken regulation but stopped short of introducing “pre-designated” dominant labels to enforce prohibition on cross-selling and other restrictions. It must balance to make sure that the competitiveness of domestic platform operators is not compromised while ensuring protection for children.