10000 Years Of History Show That Expecting Big Tech To Self-Regulate Is A Fantasy
10000 Years Of History Show That Expecting Big Tech To Self-Regulate Is A Fantasy. Though social media and the big tech companies are relatively young, many citizens and lawmakers are fed up with their abuses.
The House of Representatives has undertaken a sweeping antitrust investigation of the industry. People ranging from Senator Elizabeth Warren to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have called for the breakup of big tech. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into the companies’ anticompetitive practices. States attorneys general are even getting into the act. Meanwhile, the big tech companies are mounting a counterattack designed to put off their day of reckoning and allow them to continue to regulate themselves.
If recent history is any guide, the likelihood of these companies self-regulating is low. In fact, throughout history, entrepreneurs have abused the privilege that society gives them to innovate, disrupt existing ways of doing things, and create new social norms. And the reactions of rulers and societies have often been much harsher than the fines Europe has been handing out to tech companies, to little effect, for years.
History documents the critical role entrepreneurs have played in developing landmark new technologies such as mortgages, metallurgy, supply-chains, factories, railroads, cars, semiconductors, computers, and the Internet, to name just a few. History also documents the ways such innovations allowed entrepreneurs to ride roughshod over their customers and their societies. And when the government (often monarchs) stepped in to regulate those innovations, entrepreneurs used their ingenuity to circumvent the new rules.
Take mortgages, for example, invented by Mesopotamian entrepreneurs around 2500 B.C. By 2350 B.C., this financial innovation had resulted in an uncontrolled number of foreclosures and bankruptcies—and, in those days, bankruptcy meant that you became a slave to your creditor.
The situation became so intolerable that the king, Uruinimgina, issued an edict forgiving all debts, releasing all debt slaves, and restoring lands lost to creditors. The entrepreneurial mortgage lenders of the time took a major hit. But they soon came up with another financial innovation: a mortgage contract where borrowers agreed to adopt the lender as their heir in case they defaulted, thus making sure that future edicts could not undo their debts.
Mortgages again became a major problem, provoking ever stronger government edicts to rescue the indebted. And there ensued a cat and mouse cycle of increasingly complicated Mesopotamian mortgage contracts and more legal restrictions on debt. This familiar cycle of over-indebtedness and loan forgiveness continues in many places around the world today.
