What Happened to ‘Big Tech’ and Antitrust? And How to Fix Them!

Wörsdörfer, Manuel

doi:10.1007/s40926-022-00193-5

Cited by 15 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The Competition and Markets Authority (2023) in the U.K., for instance, has launched an investigation examining AI foundation models; the White House (2022) has released an AI Bill of Rights draft, and VP Harris has met with several leaders of "big tech" (White House 2023a, 2023b); and OpenAI's CEO has testified before Congress. The boldest move so far has been made by the European Commission, which released its Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) draft proposal in 2021 (European Commission, 2021a, 2021b; see also European Commission, 2020, 2021d, 2022a, 2022b, followed by extensive deliberations and negotiations in the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament in 2022 and 2023.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They build on our previous work on big tech, the digital economy, the E.U. 's Digital Markets Act, and the AIA (Wörsdörfer, 2020(Wörsdörfer, , 2021(Wörsdörfer, , 2022a(Wörsdörfer, , 2022b(Wörsdörfer, , 2022c(Wörsdörfer, , 2023a(Wörsdörfer, , 2023b. The paper argues that there is a lot of hype around the AIA but also hope, especially if (some of) the proposed measures are incorporated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The following sections explore, in particular, the Act's institutional strengths and weaknesses and business implications and propose reform measures that could help to strengthen it. They build on our previous work on big tech, the digital economy, the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, and the AIA (Wörsdörfer, 2020, 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2023a, 2023b, forthcoming). The paper argues that there is a lot of hype around the AIA but also hope, especially if (some of) the proposed measures are incorporated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mitigating the adverse effects of AI with the European Union's artificial intelligence act: Hype or hope?

Wörsdörfer

2023

Glob Bus Org Exc

Self Cite

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In light of the rise of generative AI and recent debates about the socio‐political implications of large‐language models, chatbots, and the like, this paper analyzes the E.U.’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), the world's first comprehensive attempt by a government body to address and mitigate the potentially negative impacts of AI technologies. The paper critically analyzes the AIA from a business and computer ethics point of view—a perspective currently lacking in the academic (e.g., GBOE‐related) literature. It evaluates, in particular, the AIA's strengths and weaknesses and proposes reform measures that could help to strengthen the AIA. Among the AIA's strengths are its legally binding character, extra‐territoriality, ability to address data quality and discrimination risks, and institutional innovations such as the AI Board and publicly accessible logs and database for AI systems. Among its main weaknesses are its lack of effective enforcement, oversight, and control, absence of procedural rights and remedy mechanisms, inadequate worker protection, institutional ambiguities, insufficient funding and staffing, and inadequate consideration of sustainability issues. Reform suggestions include establishing independent conformity assessment procedures, strengthening democratic accountability and judicial oversight, introducing redress and complaint mechanisms, ensuring the participation and inclusion of workers, guaranteeing political independence of the AI Board, providing enhanced funding and staffing of market surveillance authorities, and mandating “green AI.”

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mitigating the adverse effects of AI with the European Union's artificial intelligence act: Hype or hope?

Wörsdörfer

2023

Glob Bus Org Exc

Self Cite

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“…Fuelled by automated feedback loops, algorithms form the basis of this large-scale collection of users' behavioural trace data. Due to the anti-competitive and monopoly-like behaviours of the largest tech-companies (such as Facebook, Amazon and Google), a small number of corporations have amassed extraordinarily large networks (Neilson and Balasingham 2022;Wörsdörfer, 2022). The endless accumulation of data and the expansion of digital networks are key aspects of digital capitalist power.…”

Section: [For Example] the Existence Of The Waitangi Tribunal [Or] Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As our social systems are now reliant on the ease and expectation of constant digital connectivity, our need for globalised digital technologies has helped to solidify the hegemony of a few 'big-tech' companies. Through their first-mover advantage and their power to acquire burgeoning technologies and companies we live in an era where a few major companies dominate the technological and communications spheres (Neilson, 2022;Wörsdörfer, 2022). Due to the gigantic networks that these few companies possess, individual users are left with minimal choices in the 'free' market.…”

Section: [For Example] the Existence Of The Waitangi Tribunal [Or] Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Extremism Machine: Exploring the Effects of Digital Capitalism on the Far-Right Field

Lindsay

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Major technological advances brought about by the technology industry have reconfigured capitalist social relations. Digital Capitalism relies on and is driven by the accumulation, analysis and commodification of digital data through complex algorithmic technologies. There are fears that these new technologies have enabled and extended a multitude of intersecting harms. In particular, there is concern that such digital technologies are being increasingly utilised to support the growth of violent extremism and terrorism. This fear was placed at the forefront on March 15th, 2019, when a white supremacist terrorist committed two consecutive attacks on separate Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist’s use of the internet to disseminate his manifesto and to livestream the attacks enabled him to project immense harm across the globe. Five years on, social media and digital messaging applications are still being used as tools to motivate, organise and sustain xenophobic violence and to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.There is a lack of consensus around methods to effectively curb the harms of online violent extremism. States and technology providers struggle to agree on effective regulation that balances the principles of an open and free internet with the protection of those who are harmed by exclusionary ideas. This thesis interrogates the underpinning structures that give rise to online and in-person hate and identifies how the contemporary socio-technical context has assisted in the spread and cross-pollination of far-right extremist ideas. It does so firstly by developing a novel theoretical framework of Digital Racial Capitalism and unpacks the intersection between histories of racial capitalism and the contemporary moment of digital capitalism. It conducts research specific to Aotearoa New Zealand through semi-structured interviews (n = 28) with representatives from the State, the Technology Sector and Frontline Anti-Fascist Activists to identify the major challenges in responding to far-right extremism within the contemporary system of digital racial capitalism.The findings of this research reveal that despite genuine attempts from regulatory bodies across the globe there are a myriad of barriers currently in place to effectively disempower far-right extremists from spreading their worldviews. One of the key barriers that the thesis focuses on is located within the system of digital capitalism itself. Through the affordances of ‘big-tech’ platforms and technologies that engage us in a variety of ways to keep us engaged and online, we amount to data-generating resources. Simultaneously, we are exposed to a variety of harms that transcend the illegal/legal binary and actions that structure the way we understand the world around us.Overall, this thesis provides a novel way of thinking about structure versus agency by reconnecting the history of racial capitalism to the present-day, and highlighting that the power of the technology industry is such that due to various assertions of power, effectively resists meaningful attempts to rein in harmful externalities. The thesis concludes by suggesting that although nascent attempts to harmonise legal mechanisms to strengthen international regulation are admireable, underscoring the affordances of the platform economy are embedded structural exclusions that lie at the centre of the capitalist system. To focus only on enforcement against those who spread and enact the socially corrosive, racist and violent ideas misses the broader picture of a (digital) society that creates the socially permissive space to hate in the first place, and the digital racial capitalist environment that profits from such division.

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Big Tech and Antitrust: An Ordoliberal Analysis

Wörsdörfer

2022

Philos. Technol.

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What Happened to ‘Big Tech’ and Antitrust? And How to Fix Them!

Cited by 15 publications

References 17 publications

Mitigating the adverse effects of AI with the European Union's artificial intelligence act: Hype or hope?

Mitigating the adverse effects of AI with the European Union's artificial intelligence act: Hype or hope?

The Extremism Machine: Exploring the Effects of Digital Capitalism on the Far-Right Field

Big Tech and Antitrust: An Ordoliberal Analysis

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