a hand holding a magnifying glass against the logos of facebook, google and amazon against a grid background
Image: The Spinoff

OPINIONPoliticsNovember 18, 2024

We need a minister for big tech, and we need one now

a hand holding a magnifying glass against the logos of facebook, google and amazon against a grid background
Image: The Spinoff

We have a minister for racing, and for space. It’s utterly indefensible that we don’t have one in sole charge of dealing with large technology platforms.

When you start looking, it’s all you see. Just last week, the Commerce Commission announced criminal charges against One NZ for advertisements around its mobile coverage that were somewhat misleading at worst. Yet Facebook’s latest wave of scam advertisements, around fake business closures, only attracted a stern word from Netsafe. Just another week. Not special, only the most recent we have in the books.

We’re running two business sectors – one taxed, tamed, scrutinised and regulated. The other a complete wild west, where actions that would be unimaginable in any other context are routine, shrugged at – accepted as part of our operating environment. I’m talking about what remains of the competitive portion of the real-world business sector in New Zealand. And about large technology platforms that increasingly own and operate our digital life and economy. 

Today we published a cover story I’ve written about what happens where those two sectors meet. It’s about banking, one of the most highly scrutinised and regulated parts of our economy, and social media, which remains completely unimagined by our laws. Over the past year Lane Nichols of the NZ Herald has built an incredible, wrenching portfolio of stories that detail what happens when those two sectors meet. Dylan Reeve wrote for The Spinoff showing just how indifferent Facebook is to anyone trying to report clear and obvious scams – they just aren’t even trying.

a woman with red docs on her face and phone on a light purple backgroun with a threatening aura
Image: Tina Tiller

On one side you have active criminal organisations using Facebook’s sophisticated advertising tools to target vulnerable New Zealanders and steal their money, sometimes their life savings. On the other you have large financial organisations grappling with the end result. No one is saying banks are blameless in all this. But it feels incredibly instructive that Facebook has faced a tiny fragment of the scrutiny that banks have had – and none of the financial penalties or direct demands for investment into solving it.

Andrew Bayly is minister of commerce and consumer affairs, and has been assigned the role of dealing with the scam industry. He has spent much of the year upbraiding banks for their role in the situation, which sees an estimated $200m a year stolen from New Zealanders. But as for social media, his tone is very different, almost deferential. 

“We want to make sure that they are a part of the mix,” he told me. “The unfortunate thing is, [Meta is] obviously a global company, and New Zealand’s a very small part of that pie… The issue with the social media platforms is, how do you get them to engage and concern themselves about New Zealand?”

Honestly, I liked him. He’s a personable, intelligent, engaging guy – but he flips to sound like a total supplicant when talking about Facebook. This is a company that has been running scam ads for as long as it’s been running ads, but that is spending more on stock buybacks and building the unwanted, unloved metaverse each year than it has spent on fraud prevention in a decade. 

For National, which claims to be the party of business and private enterprise, it’s painful watching it desperately hump the leg of any large technology player that shows up with a press release. A few weeks ago Judith Collins hosted “a fun and social evening of fine cocktails, delicious canapés and deep insight from Google… exploring Google’s transformative impact across New Zealand and how AI can be the next wave of growth for our economy and improve citizen outcomes”. An unregulated company that ships $1bn overseas to low-tax jurisdictions, pitching to be our guide into the AI future. Won’t someone, somewhere in government try and figure out the revenue implications of this? 

To be fair, these heart eyes at big tech are hardly unique to National. While prime minister, Jacinda Ardern met Amazon around a $7.5bn data centre investment that still hasn’t started years later, and largely existed to chase our renewable energy mix, even though the extra demand will naturally increase the volume of coal we burn. 

When Facebook livestreamed an atrocity, then ducked the Christchurch Call in response, we did essentially nothing. It just illustrates the extent to which government acts both completely powerless and vaguely starstruck around large technology companies, while making no attempt to deal with the externalities that result from their presence in our society and economy.

Andrew Bayly (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

It’s true that this is a phenomenally complex area. Big technology players have become totally entwined in our lives, and create amazing products that are vital to the way we live now. But we are now almost alone as a country in the enfeebled scale of our legislative response to their presence here. The sole substantial piece of legislation is the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which has taken so long to progress that it now seems to likely have been overtaken by events. 

Look around the world and it’s a very different story. The EU levies massive fines against them for tax avoidance and has pressured Meta into reduced ad targeting and ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram. Australia is banning social media for under 16s, is thinking seriously about curbs to misinformation and is contemplating local content quotas for international streaming players. Malaysia is demanding social platforms operate under licences that are contingent on them truly addressing cyber bullying and scams. Singapore is demanding that social networks curb the spread of harmful content. 

Not all of these will work. Some will fail. And Bayly is not wrong when he says that New Zealand is somewhat limited due to our scale – though we have the same population as Singapore, which is both the host to big tech’s regional headquarters and leading the charge on legislation.

Regardless, we are embarrassingly late and light on legislation. It’s unserious to pretend that the biggest problem in scams is banks, not Facebook. The government should be demanding action under threat of huge fines (or prosecution – maybe when the Commerce Commission is done with One NZ), rather than meekly hoping they might come to a meeting. Otherwise, are we even a sovereign state any more?

More Reading

    In the scams story there’s a passage that I can’t stop thinking about in the context of all this: “A few years ago I asked then broadcasting minister Willie Jackson who he thought was responsible for the social giants. ‘I guess it’s me,’ he replied. Last week I asked DPMC, the all-powerful group that sits behind the prime minister and Cabinet. They told me it was internal affairs minister and Act deputy leader Brooke van Velden. I requested an interview, only to be told that ‘after discussions here, we’ve realised this is one for the minister of commerce and consumer affairs, Hon Andrew Bayly’.”

    That is precisely the problem. We don’t have a minister where the buck stops. We have ministers for all kinds of things – for racing, for space – but none for the large technology platforms that govern our digital lives. Oversight is platooned across internal affairs, communications and media, digitising government, revenue, consumer affairs and commerce and likely more besides. Paul Goldsmith is probably the most in charge, and a very cerebral guy – but social media feels like the least important part of his least significant portfolio, which says it all.

    This is to the distinct advantage of the tech companies, who lean into the complexity and benefit from our institutional paralysis. But we, as a country, are losing here. It’s long overdue to have a single minister in charge of large technology platforms. One single source of power and responsibility for the tiny handful of global platforms that oversee the whole of the digital economy and internet itself. There is no single person to stare them down, formulate legislation and demand they contribute meaningfully to our society. We need a minister for big tech, and we need one now.

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    The BulletinNovember 18, 2024

    The haka that circled the globe

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    A polarising haka has chalked up some gobsmacking numbers around the world, and it even pursued the NZ prime minister to Peru, writes Toby Manhire in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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    Half a billion views and counting

    On Thursday afternoon in parliament, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke took to her feet, tore up a copy of the Treaty Principles Bill and led a thundering haka to protest the Act Party legislation. The intervention, in which she was joined by the public gallery and MPs from across the opposition parties, saw proceedings halted and a 24-hour suspension from the house for the 22-year-old Te Pāti Māori MP. And within hours, footage of the haka was seemingly everywhere.

    Just how viral had it gone? Last night I scrolled social media in the cause of research. An Instagram post from the New York Times had 10 million views; the Australian Triple J radio station wasn’t far behind. The BBC had clocked up 6.5 million views. In Germany, Weltspeigel’s post had 4.5 million. Across a dozen social posts by global outlets that I checked, there were more than 75 million views in total – and that’s on top of the scores of stories on the news sites themselves. . 

    Then there’s Tiktok. The numbers here are even more staggering. The New York Times post has 37 million views, while a pair of local accounts are off the charts. Two posts by Waatea News have cracked 73 million views. But even that is small fry alongside the Whakaata Māori Tiktok, which has now been viewed more than 320 million times. It’s had more than 21 million likes and 370,000 comments. (I haven’t had a chance to read them all but here, and across other posts of the video, most ranged from admiring to adoring, with a sizable minority demurring or jeering.) That’s far from all the activity out there, and already we’re over half a billion views. 

    Former PM issues ‘civil war’ warning

    Jenny Shipley has joined a growing list of grandees rebuking David Seymour’s bill, which would put a new set of Treaty principles to referendum, despite the National Party’s promise to snuff it out at second reading. She also defended Maipi-Clarke’s actions in parliament. The former prime minister told RNZ’s Saturday Morning: “The Treaty, when it’s come under pressure from either side, our voices have been raised … I remember Bastion Point – the Treaty has helped us navigate. When people have had to raise their voice, it’s brought us back to what it’s been, an enduring relationship where people then try to find their way forward. I thought the voices of this week were completely and utterly appropriate. Whether they breach standing orders, I’ll put that aside. The voice of Māori, that reminds us that this was an agreement, a contract – and you do not rip up a contract and then just say: Well, I’m happy to rewrite it on my terms, but you don’t count.”

    Shipley said: “I just despise people who want to use a treasure – which is what the Treaty is to me – and use it as a political tool that drives people to the left or the right, as opposed to inform us from our history and let it deliver a future that is actually who we are as New Zealanders … I condemn David Seymour for using this, asking the public for money to fuel a campaign that I think really is going to divide New Zealand in a way that I haven’t lived through in my adult life.” Were it to become law, she said, echoing remarks by James Shaw a year ago, that would be “inviting civil war”.

    ‘Embarrassed New Zealand globally’

    David Seymour countered by saying that, on the contrary, his bill would reverse a system which was “treating New Zealanders [differently] based on their ethnicity”. He told RNZ: “Te Pāti Māori acted in complete disregard for the democratic system of which they are a part during the first reading of the bill, causing disruption, and leading to suspension of the house.” In an interview with Newstalk ZB yesterday he said the haka beamed around the world had “embarrassed New Zealand globally … They don’t have any solutions, just theatrics.”

    Seymour had support for that position – if not for his bill beyond first reading – from Shane Jones of NZ First. The TPM response had been “threatening and ugly”, and Jones was sufficiently appalled to offer an unexpected response: imprisonment. “Parliament has inherent powers to put people in jail and the way the Māori Party are carrying on, that seems to me quite the appropriate response,” he told Newstalk ZB. 

    TPM co-leader Rawiri Waititi countered: “Haka is a natural tool we use to support our debate. If you can’t handle that, then maybe you should think of leaving parliament,” he told the NZ Herald. After recounting some of the indignities in Jones’s own record, he added: “He can go and have a shit, to be honest, and Winston Peters. Put that in your article.”

    Luxon meets Xi in Lima, pursed by a haka

    The prime minister was not in the house on Thursday, and though he did convene a press conference before his departure for Peru and the Apec summit to underscore in the sternest terms yet his opposition to the bill that National is supporting no further than select committee, Christopher Luxon must have departed with some sense of relief. His most important task in Lima: a bilateral with Xi Jinping – Luxon’s first in-person meeting with the Chinese president.

    The encounter followed a year in which, under Luxon and Winston Peters, New Zealand foreign policy has discernibly moved to solidify ties with the US, with a second-tier link to the Aukus alliance a very real, if nebulous, prospect – one which raises hackles in Beijing. Among the press pack in Peru was Sam Sachdeva, author of The China Tightrope. “By this point, the need to manage differences is baked into bilateral ties and does not appear to be undermining the relationship, with the prime minister confirming he intended to visit China sometime in the first half of next year following an invitation from Xi,” Sachdeva writes for Newsroom. “Maintaining strong relations without pulling punches may be crucial in the coming years, particularly if Trump tariffs take a toll on Kiwi exporters and lead them to invest even more in New Zealand’s top trading partner.”

    As for escaping the controversies of home, no such luck for Luxon. Not just because the New Zealand media were asking about domestic matters – that’s a given. But because, as Jason Walls reveals in the Herald, half the summit attendees seemed to be watching that haka video on their phones. 

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