The Past Comes Round: Stories and Essays by Peter McMillan - HTML preview
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Endnotes
(1) The ‘Brussels Effect,’ a term coined by Bradford, is attributable to the population size and relative per capita wealth of the EU market. The size and wealth of the EU market is often enough to compel voluntary compliance by tech firms who for business reasons prefer to have one set of regulations globally instead of multiple regulatory systems for different countries/regions.
(2) In the U.S., individual freedom (especially free speech) and corporate freedom (especially to innovate) are prized, while in China, the state goals of technological progress, economic growth and social harmony predominate.
(3) Bradford makes several references to the January 6th insurrection in the U.S. in 2021 in order to illustrate the unintended consequences of absolute free speech. She is clearly on board with EU free speech norms, which are intended to regulate hate speech and disinformation.
(4) All is not perfect in the EU. Germany and France have always been 1st among equal, and this has created dissension within EU among those who feel that for some national sovereignty and democracy have been compromised by European integration. Furthermore, the EU is not immune to charges of hypocrisy. While the European Commission (the EU’s executive) has taken issue with large foreign mergers going back to its blocking of the GE/Honeywell merger in 2001, the EC is not always unfriendly to EU mergers that result in an EU national champion, as for example in the pharmaceutical industry.
(5) It's important to note that this book was published before the second Trump Administration. While there has recently been strong anti-big tech sentiment in America, this has been tempered by Trump's ultra-nationalism, which paints Big Tech in a more positive light as American national champions in the global market.
(6) An important issue for the future of technological progress and liberal democracies is missing from this book. There is a common belief among tech firms and governments with respect to potentially harmful technology that ‘we build it, but we do not choose how it will be deployed’ creates plausible immunity from charges of aiding and abetting bad actors whether they are autocrats, terrorists or criminals. In America and elsewhere, this has long been used to defend weapons R&D and sales, so should not surprise anyone that today digital tech uses the same defense. This calls to mind the Bradbury short story, 'The Flying Machine.'