The industry’s “digital trade” strategy seeks to preemptively constrain governments.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University.
Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not only shaping our economy, but our society—with questions of privacy, monopoly power, online racial discrimination, misinformation, hate speech, incitement, and impacts on mental health at the fore of the policy debate.
In a democratic society, designing policies to mitigate the harms—while preserving the benefits that these platforms bring, and keeping true to a range of principles and ideals to which most Americans subscribe—is hard. It often entails balancing one individual’s rights against another’s.