Can Technology Be Stopped?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2018
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can the Big Four - Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple - be reined in and forced to play by the rules society sets, rather than imposing their own standards on society? It seems like news breaks every few weeks that reveal how the technology on which we increasingly depend - smartphones, search engines, social media - is not as passive as many of us thought. Big data, fake news, extremism, Russian trolls: with little or no regulatory supervision, the big tech companies are changing the world and disrupting our lives. Yet governments seem to have little power to respond. The tech giants look too big, too international and too hard to pin down.
So is it time to disrupt the disrupters? Journalist and writer Jamie Bartlett asks how we can regulate big tech. He meets the regulators who are daring to reclaim power, and assesses the challenges involved in imposing rules on an industry which is deeply complicated, ever changing and supranational. Do governments have the resources to reassert sovereignty over something which has become so embedded in our culture? And how would society change if they did?
Producer: Gemma Newby.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
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| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:41.0 | Hi, I'm Jeminewby and I'm the producer of this week's analysis. Can technology be stopped? |
| 0:46.8 | In the program, technology writer Jamie Bartlett asks whether the big tech beasts can be reined in by governments. If you like this episode, there's a bonus |
| 0:54.8 | interview at the end with the former director of Demos, Richard Reeves, on why governments regulate. |
| 1:00.3 | Thanks for listening. |
| 1:00.9 | We're in the early skirmishes of a battle over who controls the internet. |
| 1:06.0 | In the red corner, the tech giants, international, fast and dynamic. |
| 1:12.0 | In the blue, the world's governments, national, slow bureaucratic. |
| 1:18.0 | For the last several years, governments have largely ignored the tech giants, |
| 1:22.0 | assuming they were harmless, not any longer. |
| 1:25.6 | Times have changed. |
| 1:27.2 | I think that the era in which we ask nicely is over. |
| 1:33.0 | As tech plays an ever greater role in our lives, |
| 1:36.0 | there are a growing number of issues governments are looking to regulate, |
| 1:40.0 | monopolistic behavior, hate speech, opaque algorithms, privacy and more. |
... |
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