Steve Ballmer states Google, Facebook need to engage more with regulators

Google and Facebook must engage with regulators so they do not deal with harder effects later on, the previous CEO of Microsoft recommended Monday.

“It’s a whole lot better to engage with regulators than leave things to legislative action,” Steve Ballmer stated Monday at the WSJ Tech D.LIVE conference in Laguna Beach,California He kept in mind that business need to do things they do not always desire, in order to prevent more legal oversight

“Companies will continue to get looked at,” Ballmer stated. “My own experience tells me we would have been better doing a little more than we wanted to early.”

He included throughout a later panel at the conference that guideline by Congress might be among the worst things to take place due to the fact that lawmakers do not have the technical understanding required to make great guidelines.

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“It’s super important to have experts,” Ballmer said, and the best experts come from the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice, not Congress. “As much as that can be painful for a company, at least you’re sitting down with other technical experts, who represent the best interest of the people.”

Ballmer would know what it’s like to face scrutiny by regulators. He oversaw Microsoft in 2002, when a federal judge concluded the company violated antitrust laws by leveraging its monopoly position in operating systems to capture the market for web browsers.

Microsoft’s second CEO, Ballmer led the company after Bill Gates stepped down in 2000 until 2014. During his tenure helming the company, he helped launch the Xbox video game console and Bing search engine, and steered the company toward what became the company’s successful Azure business server business. He also oversaw Microsoft’s efforts to expand its software to phones and tables. The phone effort failed and cost the company billions of dollars, but its Surface line of computers have received positive reviews.

Since leaving, Ballmer bought and then sold a sizable stake in Twitter, funded a website called USAFacts that helps people better understand the US government spending, and bought the Los Angeles Clippers.

Former Chicago Bulls player Scottie Pippen attended Ballmer’s talk Monday at the WSJ conference.

Google and Facebook — along with Twitter — have been facing scrutiny by the federal government over their business practices. The Silicon Valley tech giants are still in the doghouse with Congress after Russian trolls abused their platforms to sow discord and false news among US voters in the 2016 presidential election. Google, Facebook and Twitter have said they detected new campaigns from foreign actors attempting to influence public opinion ahead of last week’s US midterm elections.

In September, Facebook Operating Chief Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before Congress, but no representative from Google attended. The three companies were summoned to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on election security, privacy and abuse on their popular social media platforms.

It may only be a matter of time before Google gets called in front of Congress again, and next time, the company will have little recourse but to send its top executives, analysts say. 

Meanwhile, companies, including Apple, have called for more tech regulation, particular when it comes to privacy.

Tech and democracy

Ballmer, speaking later Monday during a panel about tech and democracy, noted there are technologies that can help people get accurate news, instead of fake news and spam. Social media is the No. 1 way people get their news, he noted, but it’s also considered by people to be the least reliable form of news.

There needs to be “innovation around trust” when it comes to various commentators, news providers and others, Ballmer said.

“Tech will have to evolve to build the level of trust, even in social media,” he said. 

Palmer Luckey, the controversial co-founder of Oculus, said on the same panel that “we’re seeing polarization between political parties making people disagree on things that should be bipartisan.” That includes national security, he said. For instance, Google decided last month to pull out of the bidding for a $10 billion Pentagon contract after employee protests. Google said the project may conflict with its principles for ethical use of AI.

In Silicon Valley, “people have a little bit of a warped perspective,” Luckey said. “Of course [people in Silicon Valley believe] it threatens for Google to offer the military much better techs. In wider America, practically no one concurs with that.”

He included that while the United States isn’t best, “if you’re going to get upset about the ways tech is being used, look at China, where it’s being used to mass profile its own residents and lock them up in camps.”

Luckey is best called the wunderkind developer whose 2012 Kickstarter task for a brand-new kind of virtual truth headset called Oculus Rift drew billions of dollars of financial investment, reignited interest in the innovation and made him a fortune while doing so.

In 2014, Oculus VR, the start-up he cofounded, was purchased by Facebook for more than $2 billion, landing him on the cover of Time publication. Back then, Luckey appeared predestined to end up being a tech star promoting his business’s items, comparable to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

It didn’t exercise. In 2017, Luckey left Facebook under a cloud of debate following discoveries he had actually assisted fund unusual political activity on the social networking website Reddit, consisting of an evident signboard outside Pittsburgh with a cartoonish similarity of then-presidential prospect Hillary Clinton and the words “Too Big to Jail.”

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Luckey was put on leave and after that fired by Facebook for supporting Donald Trump.

CNET’s Ian Sherr added to this report.

Originally released at 3: 22 p.m. PT
Update at 4 p.m. PT: Adds remarks by Palmer Luckey throughout a WSJ panel.

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