An ‘eraser button’? Focused ideas could help bridle Big Tech

Lawmakers are getting creative as they introduce a slew of bills intended to take Big Tech down a peg and the proposed legislation targeting personal data collected from young people could hit the bottom line of the social media companies. — AP

WASHINGTON: Break up Big Tech? How about shrinking the tech companies’ shield against liability in cases where the content they push to users causes harm? Or creating a new regulator to strictly oversee the industry?

Those ideas have captured official attention in the US, Europe, UK and Australia as controversy has enveloped Facebook – which on Oct 28 renamed itself Meta – Google, Amazon and other giants. Revelations of deep-seated problems surfaced by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, buttressed by a trove of internal company documents, have lent momentum to legislative and regulatory efforts.