Lincoln Shorts Ep52: Charles Duan, Policy Solutions for Big Tech Anti-Competitive Behavior
Channel: Foundation for American Innovation
Date: 07/12/2020

Charles Duan, Senior Fellow for Technology and Innovation Policy at R Street, speaks with Sean about putting control back into the customer's hands. Specifically making the user's social graph their own property similar to other PII. Requiring interoperable access to Facebook's backend then becomes mandatory. A different frontend would then have access to Facebook backend data, allowing the user to decide what content is prioritized or filtered. 

We have a similar example in email. Email has many products that can access mail systems with many flexible filtering features. This is true interoperability. However this technology didn't happen overnight. It has evolved over the past couple of decades providing more features and allowing for more disaggregation over time.

The work that is required to make current technology possible interoperable will require a consortium of technical experts to incrementally build something similar to how email has evolved. We will need standards bodies similar to IETF and WC3 outside direct government involvement.

In future discussions we will touch more interoperability examples like the Apple Appstore and Telsa Roadsters.

More information on the subject: 

https://lincolnpolicy.org/tag/innovation-governance/

https://www.dol.gov/general/ppii

https://www.w3.org/Consortium/

https://www.ietf.org/about/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/house-amazon-facebook-apple-google-have-monopoly-power-should-be-split/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability