How do you solve a problem like Big Tech?

‘BIG TECH’. LIKE Big Pharma, Big Oil or—most notorious of all—Big Tobacco, such a description doesn’t bring to mind boundless benevolence or a strict ethical code. How Facebook, Google and others went from Silicon Valley darlings to the pantomime villains of the Digital Age is a story for another day. For now, it’s ‘Big Tech, big problems’ as one Financial Times headline put it.

Those ‘problems’ are many. By now they’re so well known that they barely need repeating. Sexual harassment and data misuse are just two, and we might call the lack of transparency that allowed these to go on for so long a third. But each week, a flurry of news reports reminds us that visionary though they may be, the companies whose products we use on a daily basis could and should do better. And answers have been offered.

A whistleblower campaign launched last month by Fight for the Future, the non-profit digital advocacy group, was just one attempt to solve Big Tech’s big problems, or our big problems with Big Tech. The group launched the website SpeakOut.Tech, which gives tech workers the means to leak information safely and mobilise their colleagues in useful ways. Fight for the Future is based in Silicon Valley, and so it follows that their efforts would be directed at those working for the companies in question. But it also recognises that generally these workers are not to blame for the misdeeds of their bosses, and that they have the power and the position to initiate reform from within.

For Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, the solution is to break up Amazon, Facebook and Google and ‘free’ the American people from their grip. She made the pitch before a town hall appearance in a New York neighbourhood where activists forced Amazon to abandon plans to open a new headquarters. Senator Warren, who has long called for breaking up the big banks, is at least right insofar as she appreciates just how much influence Big Tech has in our daily lives—and therefore how serious it is when they take advantage of that relationship. And she appears to have been vindicated: on Monday, POLITICO reported that Facebook had removed several of her campaign ads from their platform. ‘I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor,’ Warren said.

In the UK, the House of Lords suggests a ‘digital super-regulator’ might make the difference by overseeing the various bodies charged with safeguarding the internet. This Digital Authority, the Lords communications committee believes, would make sure the current patchwork quilt of regulators doesn’t lead to gaps and overlaps. And that self-regulation is failing, as the committee concluded, certainly seems to be the case, at least judging by the problems that continue to blight the Big Tech companies.

Many more solutions have been put forward. Given the novelty of the circumstances in which we currently find ourselves, we can’t possibly know for sure which represents the best one. We can take encouragement from the positive outcomes of some measures taken already: the EU’s GDPR, for example, is now generally thought to have been a qualified success. And we can also take encouragement from the way in which GDPR and our ongoing conversations about Big Tech have led most of us to conclude that online privacy should be a feature of any desirable society.

That said, when you read of how Molly Russell was ‘suggested’ social media posts about self-harm and suicide before she took her own life, or how every major social media platform was taken advantage of to influence the 2016 US election, it’s clear that something needs to be done. Finding the right solution, and getting it past the tech giants that stand in the way, will be one of the greatest obstacles to overcome.