White House wants US big tech companies to adhere to six basic rules
The White House wants tech giants in the United States to adhere to six basic rules. These rules should limit the power of large tech companies and ensure, among other things, fair competition, more transparency and better privacy protection.
With the six basic rules, the White House wants to limit the power of tech giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon and give other companies a chance as well. One of the basic rules is therefore to promote competition in the technology sector. The White House says the United States needs “clear traffic rules to ensure that small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs can compete on a level playing field.”
The White House wants to require tech giants with a different rule at the federal level to limit the amount of privacy-sensitive information they collect to a minimum. As a result, Americans “don’t need to be burdened with reading the fine print.” This mainly concerns sensitive information, such as location data and health data.
In addition, the White House wants to ensure that the safety of children comes first and is therefore more important than turnover and profit. Tech giants must therefore protect children with even stronger privacy and online measures. Part of this is to curb ‘excessive data collection and targeted advertising to young people’.
The White House has also drafted a rule that should remove legal protections for major tech platforms. Because of the current legislation, the major tech companies in the United States can currently hardly be held liable when illegal content appears on their platforms. The White House wants to change that.
Furthermore, tech companies must be transparent about their algorithms and content moderation decisions. According to the White House, tech platforms are opaque in their choices, while their decisions about what content to show to which user “deeply impact the lives of Americans.”
Finally, discriminatory algorithmic decision-making must stop. According to the White House, strong protections must be in place to ensure that the algorithms of tech companies do not discriminate. Algorithmic discrimination takes place, for example, by not giving all groups an equal opportunity or by discriminating against vulnerable groups by exposing them to risky products.
Update, Sunday 2:25 PM: edited the article to show the six basic rules more clearly and explain them in more detail.