As tech companies maintain their spot as economic and social powerhouses, questions continue to be raised about regulation and oversight. Opponents of this regulation claim that it will stop valuable progress, halting an innovative field that does fine on its own. But with constant scandals and increasingly difficult questions about fairness and influence, it’s important to decide the direction and scope of regulation. With companies like Facebook gathering and selling the millions of Americans’ data and supposedly impartial algorithms perpetuating racial discrimination, it’s time for the government to make sure that these companies respect the rights of their users [1]. With proposals to introduce new data privacy laws and reinstate net neutrality, there are concrete steps that can be taken to begin tech regulation [2]. The huge influence of these companies, increasing public mistrust, and mounting ethical issues all mean that immediate regulation is vital to the future of technology in America.

Silicon Valley is quickly creating powerful economic and social forces with little to no oversight. Tech companies are the largest in the world, and their vast market power is only growing [3]. However, their quick rise to the top has meant lagging regulation and a field that still isn’t fully understood. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos are able to accrue vast amounts of wealth while their company continues to mistreat their workers and attempts to hold taxpayer dollars hostage [4]. Tech companies also continue to amass social and political power. A study in Nature revealed the increasing power of platforms like Facebook to influence political behavior of its users [5]. Social media’s widespread use and importance in society gives these sites significant influence over culture and public perception, but this impact often goes unnoticed. With the growing issue of Russian interference in the election, largely through targeted Facebook ads, we must be aware of the political, social, and economic sway that these companies have over the American public. Considering these companies’ complete inability to regulate themselves, allowing this influence to go unchecked is foolish, [6].

The American government’s continued inaction on regulation reflects a disturbing disconnection with the opinions of the public. Public polling shows that although people support technological growth as a concept, their support of companies is waning [7]. Most of this growing mistrust is focused on companies like Facebook that have found themselves at the center of various scandals. Although these results are limited, they show that repeated scandals and ethical infringements by tech giants haven’t gone unnoticed by the general public. Furthermore, the federal government isn’t listening to its constituents on the issues of technology. A 2017 poll shows that 80% of voters support net neutrality, but the FCC stripped away those rules [8]. Although there was major dissent against this decision both online and by some Democratic lawmakers, the FCC went ahead without good reason and discarded one of the last factors equalizing the internet [9]. Without these regulations, companies like Comcast and Verizon can have even more control over the freedom and information that the internet represents. Online access is no longer an impenetrable or unimportant issue—it is a basic necessity, and lawmakers need to realize this before these companies can cement even more control over a fundamental part of the modern world.

In recent years, the assimilation of digital property into our individual identities and estates has resulted in a certain degree of culture shock. Most specifically, it raises new questions about privacy versus national security. Discussions and debates over topics like PRISM (a governmental surveillance program infamously unveiled during the 2013 Snowden leaks) and the ethics of providing the government with security backdoors continue, over and over again, to bring these issues to the forefront of modern discourse[12]. Though the intricacies of each case may change, a few central questions have remained constant: Should the American government have any access to citizens’ private data (or, near-equivalently, to the technology firms that host/grant access to that data)? If so, how much access should it have?

Although there is no doubt that such companies have begun to command impressive sway over the general population (and, as such, shouldn’t necessarily have entirely free rein) there is still much to be said for the right to privacy. In the modern age, one’s digital data has become inseparable from the rest of one’s personal estate. To that end, any digital information under an American citizen’s name must be protected, which has important ramifications on industry control. Consider that the technology industry has thrown itself into cloud/information storage over the last few years; in 2017, the cloud storage market was worth approximately $31 billion, but is estimated to be worth nearly $90 billion come 2022 (at a compound annual growth rate of 23.7%) [13]. As our lives become more digitized, and as enterprise continues its march into internet cloud-based databasing and new avenues of providing services, this figure will only continue to grow.