South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a popular 2020 candidate among Silicon Valley’s wealthy donors, but taking their money won’t deter him from regulating Big Tech, he said on the latest episode of Recode Decode With Kara Swisher.
“The internet started out as this delicate flower that had to be cultivated and we had to let it see where it was going to go,” Buttigieg said. “Now we know where it’s going to go, and it’s time to put in the guardrails.”
Among Buttigieg’s proposals for tech regulation: a national data privacy framework that guarantees the “right to be forgotten” from the internet; recognition of Uber drivers and other gig economy workers as employees with the right to unionize; and more aggressive scrutiny of companies like Facebook when they try to acquire smaller competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram.
“If something doesn’t have a charge for the service, that doesn’t mean that it can consolidate infinitely without any harms,”…
