“The social media are outside of our constitutional system,” complained Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism, on Tuesday at the start of the online congress “Digital capitalism – a turning point through Corona?” of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. When Facebook went public, the founder Mark Zuckerberg was given “total control over the world’s dominant communication channels”. For the US economist there is no doubt: The big platforms must be “placed under democratic control”.

Our dependency made clear The corona pandemic “shows us our dependence,” said Zuboff. Even politicians rely on Facebook and Twitter “to communicate with their voters”. The greats from Silicon Valley have achieved “unacceptable power”. The invasion of almost all living spaces and privacy by tech companies such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft is meanwhile so total “that we can no longer bear it”.

Citizens would have to resist and encourage politics to hunt in the event of drastic regulatory measures, the Harvard professor emeritus put forward as the slogan. We humans have entered the digital age “naked”, “without specific rights and institutional forums”. This is comparable to the situation at the end of 19. Century in industrial capitalism, when there was no fair pay and no regulated working hours for workers and, for example, no banking supervision. Political reactions are now comparable to those in 20. Century, on surveillance capitalism.

It is important to dissuade the digital economic system from purely extracting and marketing personal information, said Zuboff at the 26. November conference a solution approach into play. A competition between public and private actors is important in order to use data appropriately in the interests of the people and, for example, to cure diseases and to counter climate change.

Facebook’s renewed failure The team of the newly elected US President Joe Biden has said little about “tech regulation”, has not escaped the researcher. The failure of Facebook in particular in the past few weeks was so colossal that the “Stop the Stealing” movement was able to organize itself over the network before and after the election. Zuckerberg just looked at the whole “well-oiled machine for disinformation” without doing anything.

Meanwhile, however, 74 percent of the US worried -Americans for misinformation, 75 percent are in favor of better privacy protection, Zuboff referred to studies by the Knight Foundation and Accountable Tech. An even larger proportion of the population has completely lost trust in social media. On Facebook, the “overwhelming majority” is that the platform divides, disseminates toxic content, does not fight against racism and puts “profit over community”. The industry has “a comparably bad image as the tobacco industry”, which will be the wind in the sails of the legislature.

That an initiative for better conditions for drivers from Uber & Co. has failed in California, the author described as a “tragic decision”. The companies concerned had packed their resistance to the project in an ideological campaign in order to preserve alleged freedoms. The gig economy often tries to circumvent laws and builds on the “greed society”. Zuboff urged patience. It also took a long time to enforce a ban on child labor.

Preparation for the next crisis Overall, the 68 – year-old hopes that the world will embark on a third, democratic path between Silicon Valley and China, so that the major platforms are also under a leadership role USA to contain. The EU Commission is planning to take the first steps in December with the draft of a Digital Services Act (DSA). It should oblige systemically important companies to open up their data resources and thus strive for “a little more equality of power”, demanded the Berlin sociologist Philipp Staab. Politicians should secure public control over such portals via open interfaces.

For many areas, the professor considers it crucial to set up public platforms straight away. According to him, it would make sense, for example, to network the retail sector locally with this approach in such a way that it is capable of “same-day delivery” and can involve bicycle couriers immediately. Bringing oneself into complete dependency on a “small number of US leading companies”, on the other hand, is bad for the resilience required especially in times of corona and similar future crises At the hands of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, the Berlin professor for sustainable digitization Tilman Santarius pointed out. Since these are also among the content providers, not only is net neutrality at risk, but also the common good in the medium term. The latter also applies to mobility providers who have “not yet implemented any ecological route guidance”.

Public law portals for the public “We need data governance,” countered the expert. Trustees should be installed “who have at least a public mandate” and regulate access to the measured values. Interoperability is also “extremely useful”. But European governments have problems with know-how, money and the will to “achieve the primacy of the political at all”.

That was grist to the mill of SPD leader Saskia Esken, who has long advocated the “sharing” of non-personal company data and a “public infrastructure company”, at least for broadband expansion. It is overdue to bring such projects into the hands of the state in order to “finally put an end to the embarrassing failure” in closing white gaps in the Internet supply, the Social Democrat now underlined. She advocated the motto: “Public money, public good.”

“We need platforms for collaboration, of which we know that the communication and the data remain private,” emphasized Esken. The state should offer this. She raised the question of whether a search engine that opens up “central access to the knowledge of the world” for many should be in private hands. Online portals would also have to give users “insight into their sorting and filtering algorithms”, which should be enforced at EU level. In any case, she wants to strengthen the “ability of civil society to organize itself via public service platforms”.

(mho)