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Dragging
the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world out to Washington
indicates that the government means business, but as we've seen
repeatedly this year, nobody knows what to do with technology companies.
Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, faced the The House Judiciary Committee this
week over data collection practices and much more, but didn't really
need to defend much at all because senators were more concerned with
their own problems than real questioning.
Over
the space of three hours, Pichai was pressed on legitimate topics, like
what location data Google actually collects and why, to the absurd,
such as questions about why Republican hate speech is labeled as hate
speech on the search engine.
We got inklings of frustrations with the company: what is Google
actually tracking? How can we be sure it's fair? What are you up to in
China? Unfortunately, yet again, we're left with no actual answers.
The
problem is how little has been achieved with these hearings, revealing
the need for a better format in the future. Pichai was able to get away
with dodging almost any question simply because he understands the
technology well enough to side-step answering it, confounding senators
in the process.
Here's an example: Pichai was asked a few times about location tracking and how consumers are essentially unaware it's happening.
He was able to avoid detailing the specifics by just saying that users
'opt' to use location services when they use apps, but if correctly
pressed I'd bet that the fact that a phone is almost useless without
those services, which also happen to track location for advertising
purposes, would be a sticking point.
This
year's series of big-technology hearings were interesting because it
was rare for CEOs to be dragged in front of committees before now, but
what's becoming apparent is how ill-equipped governments around the
world are to deal with well-versed, tech-savvy CEOs at all.
Mark
Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey have all faced similar
hearings this year, and despite their companies' respective scandals,
monopolies or scale, essentially walked away unscathed. In some cases,
the government in the U.S. has asked the companies how they'd like to be regulated, indicating they have no real clue where to start.
What's
clear is technology companies are huge, and governments around the
world are thinking about what they should to with the likes of Apple,
Google, Facebook, Amazon and other giants, given their size.
The problem is that outside of the EU's pursuit of Google on antitrust violations,
nobody really has any clue how to proceed, let alone how to get real
answers out of these companies. Perhaps there's a better format, where a
hearing includes technology-minded folks on the government side?
Imagine!
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