Facebook Australia row: A dose of realism on tech regulation

Amol RajanMedia editor@amolrajanon Twitterimage copyrightGetty Imagesimage captionFacebook has blocked all news content to AustraliansThe enormous beef between Australia’s government and Facebook has persuaded a lot of people that we are entering a new era of technology regulation. In policy and news conferences from Palo Alto to Perth, mostly conducted on Zoom of course, heavy chat about regulation and chin-stroking reliably go together. But as is often the way with complex areas of policy, the word “regulation” has now been so used and abused as to have lost all precision in meaning. A dose of accuracy, and realism, is overdue. There are countless types of regulation, whether social or economic, most of them yet to be invented. Different countries have radically different approaches to regulation. The types of company being regulated vary hugely. And regulation, whatever form it takes, is likely to have consequences that are both slow and unforeseeable. To Australia first. The consistent negative publicity and coverage of Facebook in recent years has coloured the debate to such an extent that Facebook’s argument has been somewhat lost in the coverage that I’ve seen. It’s important to re-assert this, not to defend Facebook, but because there is a principle at…
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