Frances Haugen Wants A Digital Regulator — And So Does Facebook

Frances Haugen, the (hopefully first of many) Facebook whistleblower, made one thing abundantly clear in both her 60 Minutes interview and her Senate Hearing: The United States needs a specialized agency to oversee digital platforms. Antitrust enforcement alone is not enough. Breaking up Facebook would solve some problems, but without additional oversight it will also produce a bunch of smaller companies all running algorithms that maximize engagement regardless of the harm to society. Companies, Haugen warned, “will always put profits over people.” Haugen further emphasized that effectively regulating Facebook (and other digital platforms) requires specialized expertise about the sector. “Right now, the only people in the world trained to analyze these experiences are people who grew up inside of Facebook,” Haugen said. We don’t just need new laws, or to expand the Federal Trade Commission. As Haugen stressed multiple times, we need a specialized, sector-specific regulator to do the job right. In 2019, when Public Knowledge first published the blueprint for a digital platform regulator, few people were willing to concede that regulation was necessary — let alone a sector-specific regulator. But the last two years have shown that a sector-specific digital regulator is necessary, not “radical.” If you believe Frances Haugen and her case against Facebook, you should support her conclusion (and those of many others) that we can only comprehensively address the harms of digital platforms with a new expert agency.

[Harold Feld is Public Knowledge's Senior Vice President and author of "The Case for the Digital Platform Act."]