Elizabeth Warren Wants Congress To Be Smarter About Tech… While Grossly Overstating Google & Facebook's Market Power

Say That Again

from the let's-start-at-home dept

So, this is good! Elizabeth Warren has announced that she supports bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment.

My anti-corruption plan reinstates and modernizes the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), strengthens congressional support agencies, and transitions congressional staffers to competitive salaries so that Congress can act based on the best expertise and information available.

[….]

Reinstate and modernize the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA was originally led by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, with votes divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The new OTA should be led by a single, independent director to ensure that increased partisanship does not prevent members of Congress from receiving the information they need. The OTA should also have the authority to self-commission reports and be equipped to respond to short-term requests from Members, such as preparing for hearings, writing regulatory letters, and weighing in on agency rulemaking, rather than largely limiting its efforts to lengthy long-term reports. And the OTA should have in-house experts on interdisciplinary issue areas so that it can provide information and analysis on issues like climate change and technology consolidation that do not fit within a single issue area.

That all looks good. Indeed, we’ve been calling for Congress to reinstate and modernize the Office of Technology Assessment for many, many years, so it’s good to see Warren apparently on board with this plan (though I’ll note that she does not appear to be a co-sponsor of an existing bill to help modernize the OTA.

She frames it, somewhat accurately, as a way to get beyond Congress relying on lobbyists and those with dodgy information. And that would be a good thing. But it does seem a bit ironic that the same day she puts out this plan about no longer having tech policy driven by dodgy one-sided information, Alec Stapp gave a detailed explanation of how Warren, herself, was basing a key claim for why Google and Facebook should be broken up on very, very dodgy information.

A big part of Warren’s argument was that Google and Facebook are so dominant on the internet today, that they basically control the flow of information. She claimed that 70% of all traffic went through those two companies.

More than 70% of all Internet traffic goes through sites owned or operated by Google or Facebook.

Stapp decided to dig into that number and found… that while the data is not clear, it’s likely to actually be less than 20%. That’s a pretty damn big difference. Like we’ve seen in other studies where “big” stats are extrapolated from a single report that doesn’t cover what people pretend it covers and are limited by small sample sizes or not representative samples, the same thing seems to have happened here.

And, like those other studies, this one involves a game of telephone as well. The number appears to come from a study from a web analytics company, Parse.ly, from 2015, looking at traffic sent to just 400 news publishers. This is not a random sample. That study showed that Facebook sent 39% of the traffic to the publishers in the sample while Google sent 34%. That was picked up on by a freelance blogger who posted a story on his own website claiming “GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic” which is not at all what the Parse.ly study meant or implied. From there, bastion of fact checking, Newsweek, wrote a piece about who controls the internet and cites the freelancer’s blog. And that brings us back around to Warren, who cites the Newsweek piece.

Voila. A fake statistic laundered through four sources.

Stapp then uses Sandvine’s much more thorough research to suggest that perhaps Google and Facebook drive a bit less than 20% of internet traffic.

As for Google and Facebook? The report found that Google-operated sites receive 12.00 percent of total internet traffic while Facebook-controlled sites receive 7.79 percent. In other words, less than 20 percent of all Internet traffic goes through sites owned or operated by Google or Facebook. While this statistic may be less eye-popping than the one trumpeted by Warren and other antitrust activists, it does have the virtue of being true.

So, yes, it would be good if tech policy was based on more realistic information — and bringing back the OTA would be great. Then, perhaps, Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t also be relying on dodgy stats passed around through bad reporting.

Filed Under: congress, elizabeth warren, monopoly power, ota
Companies: facebook, google