Amazon & Inequality; Social Media & Regulation

In this episode we focus on the question of what should be done to constrain the dominance of the tech platforms, and to regulate the ways in which they control aspects of our economy, markets and the public sphere.

First up, we hear from Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica that has just written a book that considers Amazon’s dominance and what it means for wealth of American cities and people called Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.

Then, we listen to a panel discussion from the Betalab: Fix The Internet program at Betaworks. The discussion focuses on priorities for the regulation of social media, and features Yaël Eisenstat, Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab and formerly a CIA officer, a White House advisor, and the Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising at Facebook; Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade association that advocates for media companies such as The New York Times, Conde Nast, ESPN, Vox, Politico and Insider, and the Chairman of TrustX, a cooperative digital advertising marketplace designed to address the industry's trust, transparency and accountability challenges in digital advertising; and Marietje Schaake, international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs and technology policies.