Thread by @MarkWarner

This is something I’ve been working on with @HawleyMO and @SenBlumenthal for a while. Today I’m excited to introduce legislation that will put consumers back in the driver’s seat when it comes to digital markets that are dominated by big tech platforms.

https://twitter.com/axios/status/1186594293957517313

This legislation is rooted in the idea that competition in the private sector is key to America’s economic success.

Without it, consumer choice suffers, technological innovation suffers, and America’s global competitiveness suffers.

This is especially true in the digital marketplace, where the unchecked rise of a few dominant tech platforms has undermined users’ ability to meaningfully control their online lives.

For many tech companies, their most valuable asset is Americans’ private data. As a result, the task of defending your online privacy is pretty daunting. Many companies employ byzantine, frequently-changing privacy settings that are often specifically designed against users.

American consumers are rightfully growing frustrated with the fact that you have to effectively sign over your private data, in order to use an internet that is mediated largely via a handful of platforms that have come to dominate it.

If we want to change that, we need to remove the current barriers to consumer choice and put Americans back in control of their data and their communications.

To accomplish this, we’ve introduced a bill called the ACCESS Act, which stands for the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act (thank you, bill-naming interns).

The ACCESS Act has three main components that would apply to the largest tech platforms:

1. Portability
2. Interoperability
3. Delegatability

Here’s what that means in plain English:

First, consumers ought to have the ability to switch social media platforms and other online services without having to start from scratch. This idea of data portability would allow you to take all your data ~ including your cat videos ~ and move it to a different service.

This would return control of data to users and create new opportunities for competition.

We know this because we’ve done it before with phone numbers.

For years, people were reluctant to change phone providers because they didn’t want to lose their number — putting the burden on consumers to circulate new contact info, potentially missing calls from contacts who still had their old number. It was a major switching cost.

But sure enough, when Congress mandated local number portability, it drove companies to compete for their customers' business, and consumers benefitted as a result.

Is the internet more complicated? Maybe, but with machine-readable formats like CSV, XML, and JSON, the technology is already there.

The primary barrier is that companies don’t want to ease restrictions that protect their market dominance.

We live in an era where personalization and predictive analytics make the difference between a successful, engaging app and a dull, frustrating app. So users’ ability to port their data – to, in effect, vote with their wallets – can catalyze competition.

Second, for data portability to really make a difference, we need to break down the anti-competitive barriers that companies put up to limit their competitors from interacting with their platforms.

This is the idea behind interoperability, the open exchange of information.

Social media platforms are governed by a concept called network effects: it means a platform is more valuable — to both the operator and users — the more people are on it.

But that also means portability isn't enough if there's nobody to share content or communicate with on a new network or service.

So if we really want competition between different providers, we need to go beyond portability and ensure interoperability between different platforms — for messages, cat videos, and the many other types of online content.

I promised plain English, so let me give you an example: E-mail is an interoperable service built on open standards. Can you imagine if you were only able to email people with the same email provider? Or if you had to pay a $10/month to email outside your provider?

Back in 2001, the FCC recognized that interoperability was key to competition and required then-dominant AOL to make its instant messaging service compatible with its competitors.
vice.com/en_us/article/…

No surprise: it drove online competition and created space for today’s services.

By requiring interoperability for major platforms, we can give consumers greater choice over how they access online services like social media, while also preventing companies from using their APIs & terms of service as weapons to shut down potential competitors or extract rents.

Third, we need to preserve delegatability — the idea that consumers should be able to allow a third-party service to manage their privacy settings across multiple platforms.

If someone wants to manage their privacy settings individually across every single service that has their data, that’s their right.

But there are services out there that allow users to delegate those responsibilities in a secure way, and our legislation would make sure consumers can take advantage of them.

Long thread, but we’re talking about some fundamental questions about the future of the internet and who our data belongs to.

We need to put users back in the driver’s seat – controlling their data, the basis on which it’s shared, and with whom it’s shared. If we want to preserve American innovation, we need to lower entry barriers and create space for the next great innovative U.S. networks.

By putting some basic rules of the road in place, we can preserve your privacy while increasing competition and openness.

That’s good for consumers.

It’s good the economy.

And ultimately, I believe it will be good for the internet.