Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook isn't just a company. It's a
behemoth, with 2.1 billion monthly users, $40 billion in revenue and more than
25,000 employees worldwide.
And that leaves Washington with a daunting task: How do
you tame a corporate giant? Or do you even try?
"It's tricky and it's going to be hard, but there are
ways it can be dealt with," says Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a former tech
executive who has led investigations into Russian interference on social media
over the last year as the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. "The
idea that we're going to keep the wild, wild West — I don't think it's
sustainable."
The picture will begin to come into focus next week.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify April 10 and 11 before
Senate and House committees as his company grapples with the privacy scandal
involving Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to President
Donald Trump.
Facebook's reckoning in Washington comes on multiple
fronts. Russia's use of the platform to meddle in U.S. elections, a regulatory
investigation that could result in fines of hundreds of millions of dollars
against the company for privacy violations, and the Cambridge Analytica episode
are all topmost concerns.
But in the capital's pro-business, anti-regulatory
climate, it's questionable whether the Republican-led Congress or Trump
regulators have the appetite to rein it in.
Facebook is spending millions on lobbying to try to ward
off regulations, even seeking to narrow a Senate bill that lawmakers call
"the lightest touch possible." It would require more transparency in
online political ads, something Facebook says it is providing on its own.
But the stakes grew Wednesday when Facebook revealed that
information belonging to as many as 87 million of its users may have been
improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, which gathered the data with the
intent of swaying elections. That number was far higher than originally known.
Congress' response to the myriad issues dogging Facebook
could depend on Zuckerberg himself. He has apologized for a "major breach
of trust" in the Cambridge Analytica episode and Facebook has announced it
would stop working with third-party data collectors.
Privacy advocates and legal experts say that's not enough.
"It strikes me as a company that is trying to weather
a PR storm and then get back to business as usual and hoping their users forget
this ever happened," said Nate Cardozo, a senior staff attorney for
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group based in San Francisco.
Facebook and other social media companies have faced
bipartisan criticism over both privacy issues and the Russian intervention. But
Trump and his pro-business GOP allies on Capitol Hill have made rolling back
Obama-era regulations a priority, which makes any new federal rules for
protecting data and privacy unlikely in the immediate future.
Republicans last year struck down online privacy
regulations issued during President Barack Obama's final months in office that
would have given consumers more control over how companies like Comcast,
AT&T and Verizon share information. Critics complained that the rule would
have increased costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among
internet companies.
And Congress elected to do nothing after Equifax disclosed
in September that hackers exploited a software flaw that the credit monitoring
company failed to fix, exposing Social Security numbers, birthdates and other
personal data belonging to nearly 148 million Americans.
Lawmakers have yet to come up with a fix for the patchwork
of conflicting state laws that govern how companies shield personal data and
notify consumers when breaches occur. Mike Litt, consumer campaign director at
U.S. PIRG, a public interest group, said Congress instead is considering
legislation that would exempt credit bureaus from data break notifications and
make it harder for states to hold them accountable.
"After the Equifax data breach, we saw Congress talk
a good game but fail to follow through on helping consumers," Litt said.
"To prevent Congress from letting Facebook off the hook, outraged
Americans need to keep up the heat."
To defend its interests in Washington, Facebook has filled
its executive ranks with former senior government officials from both political
parties. Nathaniel Gleicher, its director of cybersecurity policy, was in
charge of cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council during the
Obama administration. Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president for global public
policy, served as a senior aide to President George W. Bush.
The company spent just over $13 million on lobbying in
2017, according to disclosure records filed with Congress. One of the lobbying
team's newer members, Sandra Luff, was Attorney General Jeff Sessions' national
security adviser when he served in the Senate.
Zuckerberg suggested during a CNN interview last month
that he's open to regulation. But he quickly qualified that commitment, saying
he'd get behind the "right" kind of rules, such as the bill that
requires online political ads to disclose who paid for them. But the company is
seeking to weaken even that bill.
Warner acknowledged that even minor regulation of Facebook
and other technology companies will be difficult. But he's encouraging them to
work with Washington now, before a "catastrophic event" that could
shift the landscape or if Democrats win back seats in November's elections.
He suggests several possibilities: requiring Facebook and
other companies to disclose the country of origin of ads, creating a
self-regulatory body, or even allowing users to move their data from one
platform to another.
More drastic measures could be to allow users to own their
own data or to hold social media companies more responsible for what is posted
on their platforms.
In Europe, Facebook and other tech giants like Google are
bracing for tough new data privacy rules that take effect May 25 and will apply
to any company that collects data on EU residents, no matter where it is based.
The rules will make it easier for consumers to give and withdraw consent for
the use of their data.
In the U.S., Facebook's biggest challenge may come from
the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the company
violated the terms of a 2011 settlement that made privacy assurances.
Facebook agreed then to settle the commission's charges
that it deceived users by assuring them their information would remain private,
then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. Each violation of the
agreement could carry a penalty of up to $40,000, according to settlement
terms, meaning potential fines in the hundreds of millions.
Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor
who's written extensively about how corporations use personal data, said the
federal government's antitrust enforcers should be more vigilant with Facebook.
Facebook has completed dozens of mergers and acquisitions
since it was founded in 2004. Pasquale said the Obama administration failed to
realize the significance of two of Facebook's largest purchases: the photo-sharing
app Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp two years later for nearly
$22 billion.
"This is clearly a monopolistic company that is
trying to eliminate even the smallest challenge to its domination of the social
media market," he said.
The privacy scandal has taken a heavy financial toll on
Zuckerberg and Facebook. Forbes Magazine estimated that Zuckerberg's net worth
dropped over the last month from $71 billion to $61.7 billion. Facebook's
market value has fallen by more than $88 billion in less than three weeks since
the scandal broke, from nearly $538 billion in mid-March to about $449.5
billion.
Associated Press writer Marley Jay in New York contributed
to this report.
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