Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before a House committee on Wednesday will be “the first of many.” Blackburn described Zuckerberg as unprepared to discuss certain issues during his testimony.
She said, “One of the things that struck me was that [Mark Zuckerberg] seemed really unprepared on issues of legislation, about the Federal Trade Commission consent decrees that [Facebook] had entered into in 2011 and the implications of that. He seemed uninformed about the lawsuits that they had settled and was questioned on.
A couple of my Democrat colleagues and I were talking after the hearing, and we had expected him to come before us and be conversant in those issues. … We were surprised that he did not have information to respond to the questions he was asked.”
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Blackburn called for new legislation related to online privacy. She stated, “This is why we need to have protections for users who are using this site — because it is a tremendous amount of power, and it is why there needs to be statutes that will guard the privacy and [enact] laws so that you retain the right to protect your virtual you, you and your presence online, because they make a boatload of money selling the information about you to people that you do not know.”
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Blackburn concluded by warning against implementation of regulations that may stultify Facebook’s nascent competitors while further entrenching Facebook’s online dominance. She remarked, “I will caution one thing. Sometimes, when a company becomes very large, they will say they would like to have federal regulation. They do that because federal regulation is expensive and costly, and new-start competitors can’t compete with that. So you eliminate competition. This is why we need a very simple privacy standard and one set of rules and one regulator, and that’s it.”
Robert Kraychik – Breitbart News – April 12, 2018.
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