This is the Kaidu Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 7th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What's Big Tech done for us lately other than make its platforms addictive.

That's the message from Missouri U.S. Senator Josh Hawley

and it comes with new legislation that would regulate social media as an addictive technology.

Cato's Ryan Bourne and Matthew Feeney comment.

Listeners to this program recently will have heard Matthew Feeney and I talking about issues related to Section 230 and whether or not publishers on the

internet or internet platforms ought to be viewed as publishers.

Josh Holly of Missouri has been pushing a lot of changes to how social media is

regulated in the United States.

And he has sort of twin complaints. One complaint is that Big Tech hasn't done a lot for us.

And the other is that to the extent Big Tech has been making innovations,

those innovations have been driven largely by the intention to make

social media addictive as sticky as possible. So just in general, what are your two views of that?

When we take a look at a couple of these concerns, I think a number of things stand out.

One is that when Senator Hawley says that Big Tech isn't delivering, that it's not giving us anything, I just think he's wrong.

These are companies that are producing services that people know

not just social media a lot of the companies people know very well from

Silicon Valley are interested in driverless car technology drone

technology artificial intelligence, robotics.

It's just not true to say that these companies are not delivering.

And this kind of complaint fits into a broader discussion about social media.

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