Lawmakers on technology, and technologists on lawmaking
The Register, the ABC and The Conversation all recently reported the European Parliament's "Resolution on the Digital Single Market", which seeks to "unbundle search engines from commercial services". The resolution is presumed to target Google, and to address allegations that its search results might favour its own services over services from other providers. No one seems to expect that the resolution will have any practical effect, and a good thing too according to technology enthusiasts like David Glance at The Conversation and Marty Gauvin, interviewed for the ABC piece.
I'm not familiar with European institutions, haven't read the resolution, and can't comment on the merits of this particular resolution. The dismissals offered by Glance and Gauvin, however, seem to be underpinned by a presumption that technology makers know best and that silly uninformed lawmakers should keep out of their way.
I find it a little depressing to think that "the technology landscape fundamentally can't be shaped by politics or the law", as Glance claims. The defeatism that follows this claim doesn't explicitly acknowledge it, but the alternative seems to be to sit back and allow technology — and the companies that control it — to have its way with us. Technology companies and their cheerleaders may be comfortable with this, but are the rest of us?
Bill McKibben, in Enough (2004), points out that claims that some technology or another (he is writing about biotechnology) is "inevitable" represent attempts to sidestep debate over the merits of the claimants' technology. He notes that the Amish, for one, are famous for demonstrating that societies do have a choice to accept or reject technology. Even more mainstream societies routinely govern car technology by road rules, food technology by health regulations, and construction technology by building standards.
Enthusiasts for trendier technologies like computing and biotechnology might like to think that they are uniquely placed to understand said technologies and their effects on society, if they accept that it is possible for their favourite technologies to have a negative impact at all. But why should we believe that technologists, let alone companies with vested interests in selling technology, know any more than lawmakers about what society wants or how to achieve it?
Glance seems to accept towards the end of his article that there are, in fact, things that lawmakers can and should do address "small stuff" like privacy, intellectual property and mis-use of market power. I suppose that he means to say that the law can fiddle around the edges, but that technologies themselves appear and disappear without the input of lawmakers. Lawmakers didn't choose to invent search engines, for example. Yet lawmakers are able to decide to respond to them, and it's not clear to me why doing this should be "large stuff" beyond our ability to address if we determine a need for it.
