Tech Giants Harm Children, Concert Fans & News

The information age is racing ahead of the government’s ability to monitor or manage it. With Washington in a perpetual state of gridlock, the states must set reasonable boundaries. The California Legislature is trying just that with a series of bills that have the industry’s attention. While finding sensible and workable reforms is not easy, this is definitely worth the effort.

Senate Bill 976 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, seeks to prevent social media platforms from targeting children with unsolicited notifications.

Using complex algorithms to assess a user’s age and interests, social media companies can create an addictive cycle of use that can keep young people glued to these outlets and their screens, no matter the hour. SB 976 would prevent these platforms, when knowing the age of users, from sending notifications to minors from midnight to 6 a.m. and the weekday school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

SB 976 seeks to give parents the ability to shut down an “addictive feed” entirely. Each platform would have to establish a parental consent process after identifying the young user and his or her parents. This would be a new tool for parents seeking to reduce their children’s exposure to social media. While this concept has some technical and logistical challenges, it shifts decision-making from the social media companies back to families. There is no substitute for parenting.

Ticketmaster controls the majority of primary ticket sales to America’s big concerts and sporting events. It can also exert vertical economic power when it has the performer, venue and ticket-selling apparatus under contract.

The California Legislature hopes to lower ticket prices by creating legislation encouraging more consumer options for buying tickets. Assembly Bill 2808 by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, would prohibit Ticketmaster or any primary ticket seller from having an exclusive long-term contract with venues such as arenas.

With neither Congress nor the executive branch taking decisive action in Washington, that leaves states as the venue for progress.

Search engines such as Google and social media companies such as Facebook have become the primary news sources for many American consumers, though these companies do not produce news content. The migration of advertising revenues from the news companies to these Internet giants has hastened the decline in news gathering worldwide.

Wicks is again at the forefront of this battlefront in the new economy by seeking to redirect some news-related profits back to the outlets that produce the news. Assembly Bill 886, the California Journalism Preservation Act, would require search engines and their social media platforms to either reach agreements with the news providers on profit sharing or resolve the matter through arbitration.

McClatchy is among the journalism outlets in support of AB 886.

The legislation cleared the Assembly last year. The stakes have only risen, with search engine giant Google recently announcing it was restricting California news on its platform in protest of the legislation, raising some thorny legal questions of censorship purely for economic reasons.

The information age has produced a consolidation of economic power that rivals that of the industrial age generations ago. It took years to break up those monopolies. And that exercise was straightforward compared to reforming the algorithms of search engines or social media companies to protect the public.

Sometimes it makes sense for California to be a leader on a national policy challenge, even if it’s hard. This is one of them.