This is a review of U.S. Senator Mark Warner's White Paper.

The PDF (white paper) is available at:
https://graphics.axios.com/pdf/PlatformPolicyPaper.pdf

https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/31/democrats-tech-policy-plans-leaked

A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of
bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms,
purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save
American trust in "our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,"
it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government
intervention into online press and markets, including "comprehensive
(GDPR-like) data protection legislation" of the sort enacted in the E.U.

Titled "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and
Technology Firms," the draft policy paper—penned by Sen. Mark Warner and
leaked by an unknown source to Axios—the paper starts out by noting that
Russians have long spread disinformation, including when "the Soviets
tried to spread 'fake news' denigrating Martin Luther King" (here he fails
to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW
IT'S DIFFERENT, because technology.

"Today's tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques,"
Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us, will be even worse.

Here's how Warner is suggesting we deal:

Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social media
platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin of all user
accounts or posts.

Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social media
and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only allow
"authentic" accounts ("inauthentic accounts not only pose threats to our
democratic process...but undermine the integrity of digital markets"),
with "failure to appropriately address inauthentic account activity"
punishable as "a violation of both SEC disclosure rules and/or Section 5
of the [Federal Trade Commission] Act."

Bot labeling: Warner's paper suggests forcing companies to somehow label
bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is remotely feasible)

Define popular tech as "essential facilities." These would be subject to
all sorts of heightened rules and controls, says the paper, offering
Google Maps as an example of the kinds of apps or platforms that might
count. "The law would not mandate that a dominant provider offer the serve
for free," writes Warner. "Rather, it would be required to offer it on
reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" provided by the government.

Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political
speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more
funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies'
algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with
universities and others), and a requirement of "interoperability between
dominant platforms."

The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a
certain size must turn over internal data and processes to "independent
public interest researchers" so they can identify potential "public
health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,"
scams, "user propagated misinformation," and harassment—data that could
be used to "inform actions by regulators or Congress."

And—of course— these include further revisions to Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude
protections for prostitution-related content. A revision to Section 230
could provide the ability for users to demand takedowns of certain sorts
of content and hold platforms liable if they don't abide, it says, while
admitting that "attempting to distinguish between true disinformation and
legitimate satire could prove difficult."

"The proposals in the paper are wide ranging and in some cases even
politically impossible, and raise almost as many questions as they try to
answer," suggested Mathew Ingram, putting it very mildly at the Columbia
Journalism Review.

Posted on Rocksolid Light.

they must be really shit scared that they loose too much
control...maybe something big is in the pipeline, or it just
the normal advance of states becoming more and more
controlled by central authorities...
there was a similar proposal from europe not too long
ago...don't have the link right now...
Posted on: def2.i2p