The FTC has been tasked in Biden’s Executive Order on Competition with tackling unfair and deceptive data and surveillance practices. More enforcement actions are needed, but so is a rulemaking and other ex ante guidance. For at least two decades, Congress has been “about to” pass comprehensive privacy legislation. As…

Some implications for consumer protection President Biden’s extraordinary July 9 executive order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy lights a fire under the Federal Trade Commission, calling on it to exercise long dormant powers to address especially the aggregation of tech and data power that make people unfree. Thanks undoubtedly to Tim Wu’s stewardship…

What happened in San Diego with its smart streetlights is easily cast as a story of technology creep: LED lights turned into surveillance machines without citizen knowledge. But it is also the opposite story: intrusive data-gathering in plain sight. No subterfuge, just surrender. What started out as energy-saving smart streetlights…

During his push to erect Google/Alphabet’s first smart city on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff admitted, “I don’t think I fully appreciated what I was getting myself into.” He had not been prepared, it seems, for public resistance to the vision of a big-tech city “built from…

The cockfight between Facebook and Twitter over how to handle political advertising on digital platforms — and the all-too serious consequences — is only the most recent manifestation of western democracies’ failure to regulate digital platforms. There are a number of regulatory proposals and new laws, especially in Europe, to…

It’s as Bad As We Thought — In June 2019, Sidewalk Labs released its opus 1500 page master innovation and development plan for the Port Lands area of the Toronto waterfront, or what Sidewalk calls the IDEA space. It was a beautiful set of PDFs that laid out a vision for the kind of housing, building, public…

Written with Timon Cline In a recent column, Kara Swisher observes that sudden Congressional action on antitrust and big tech may be too late and orthogonal to what’s really needed, which is regulation. We have come to a moment of such urgency because tech has operated almost entirely on a…

We have a media policy design problem when it comes to digital speech platforms. Media policy has been entirely privatized, with speech platforms assuming the role of government without transparency or accountability. I will briefly address how First Amendment (“FA”) doctrine has evolved to place ever greater restrictions on government…

I wish that when I was the working mom of babies and toddlers, someone had written this to me. When that was then, I tried to contain my work schedule and be there, on the floor, with my young children. There was never a time when I thought that I…