A Utah representative's bold move to rein in Big Tech

Yahoo

28-02-2025

When you join a social media platform, you sign over the rights to your digital identity.
Every post, view and interaction is logged — much like client records stored in a filing cabinet, where they remain indefinitely. When deleting an app you don't get to take your data with you, and though the app may no longer be on your phone, the data isn't erased. In fact, the app continues to use and profit from it.
But a bipartisan bill in Utah aims to change that.
HB418′s purpose is to allow users the right to own, control and manage their data. In a way, it intends to 'clean up the mess that we caused by allowing tech companies to come in and control our lives,' the bill's sponsor, Rep. Doug Fiefia, R-Herriman, said.
More than 35 years ago, President Ronald Reagan said, 'The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' Fiefia added that Americans need to be wary of another power.
Big Tech.
'The most dangerous nine words in modern history is 'we are Big Tech, and we're here to help,'' Fiefia told the Deseret News.
For years, Utah has been a leader in using its legislative power to protect consumers, especially minors, from the impacts of technology, specifically social media.
Fiefia's bill has garnered national attention from prominent figures such as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of 'The Anxious Generation'; Paul Allen, co-founder of Ancestry.com; and Frank McCourt, founder of Project Liberty. Its potential ripple effects on the country and its relationship with the tech industry have made it a focal point of national discussion.
The bill, titled Data Sharing Amendments, passed the House on Day 31 of the 2025 legislative session with a 64-1 vote.
Big Tech is a common nickname for the five most prominent and influential technology companies in the world: Google, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), Amazon and Microsoft. Most of these companies have more users than countries' populations, and they dominate the economic and social power of online communication.
According to the Transnational Institute, Big Tech is the 'most profitable and valuable' industry globally, making billions in profits annually. Over time, these companies have monopolized the internet and shaped the market in their favor.
'We're completely locked into these social networks that have erected all these barriers,' Allen told the Deseret News, making it nearly impossible to compete with.
'They own us. They own our data, and we can't do anything with our social graph,' adding that HB418, if passed, would 'not just level the playing field, but give small startups a fighting chance to make a dent in this world with multitrillion-dollar corporations that have sucked up all the oxygen.'
A tech pioneer himself, Allen founded Ancestry.com in 1997, the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. He was there when Mark Zuckerberg held his very first F8 developer conference back in 2007.
'Zuckerberg stood in front of an audience of a couple of hundred people and said, 'Any third-party software developer can now build apps on top of the Facebook platform. We will let you compete with us. We just want to own the social graph, and we want third-party app developers to launch this huge app ecosystem. We'll give you 100% of the revenue from the apps that you develop,'' he said.
He shook Zuckerberg's hand, said he would launch his family apps on Facebook and went to work. Instead of going the traditional route and creating a website, Allen's team launched an app called 'We're Related' on Facebook.
'Within 29 days, we had a million users,' he said. 'Then it started adding a million a week.'
Nearly three years later, Facebook removed tens of thousands of apps from its platform, denying Allen's app access to its 120 million users. As a result, he said, they lost $750,000 in monthly revenue and were forced to lay off 40 employees.
'We were the biggest family app on top of Facebook, and Facebook shut us out and kicked all the apps off of their platform,' he said. Because they were giving apps 100% of the ad revenue, Facebook management 'must have come in and said, 'Why are you giving away 30% of your ad revenue? Why aren't you taking 100% of the ad revenue?''
'So I'm not a fan of a corporation that launches a platform, makes promises to almost 100,000 app developers, and then decides to change the rules and kicks them all off so that they can keep 100% of the ad revenue.'
Before his political career, Fiefia worked in the technology industry for nearly a decade. He saw firsthand how these companies operate.
'To keep users engaged at all cost, big tech companies collect enormous amounts of data on us,' he said during the House Economic Development and Workforce Services Committee meeting two weeks ago.
'What we like, what we watch, who we interact with, and then use it to create algorithms that keep us hooked. That data is then sold to advertisers for billions of dollars,' he added. 'I quickly realized that we are not the customer. We are the product.'
In a 2017 Axios interview, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, called himself and other Big Tech creators out for knowingly 'exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology' and doing it anyway.
He said Facebook asked, 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'
One way is through targeted advertising.
One of HB418's most compelling attributes is it would fundamentally change the power dynamic between users and advertisers.
'Advertisers will still be a customer, but we also will be a customer,' Fiefia said. Social media platforms 'will have to fight for our attention, and if it's not safe for our kids (or) if we don't love their privacy standards or terms, if we don't love the values of this company, we can leave' and take our information with us.
'I think that's the control that we all yearn for as users.'
With four children, Fiefia said his children won't be given a smartphone until after they turn 16. Social media will gradually be introduced afterward, but 'with strict guards.'
'If you look at leadership in most tech companies, their kids don't have access to social media,' he added, pointing out the hypocrisy. 'We talk about it like it's a normal thing, but we guard our kids from the technology that we're selling and that we're promoting.'
Haidt's book, 'The Anxious Generation,' is a testament to the damage technology has done to children's mental health.
In his statement supporting the bill, Haidt warned that 'social media companies know that they are facilitating and causing vast harms to our kids and have repeatedly failed to act. Many young people regret their time spent on social media, and feel compelled to use them because all of their friends are using them. Even as we work to reform and regulate existing social media platforms, users should have realistic and safer online alternatives.'
Ravi Iyer, a social psychologist who helped in the research of 'The Anxious Generation,' told the Deseret News that HB418 is a step forward in a long fight to 'break these network effects' that are negatively impacting children's mental health.
He shared a study that found 72% of teens feel social media manipulates them into spending more time on the platform than they would ideally want to.
If HB418 were implemented, it would give 'a lot more choice about the experience that you want, and you can pick the algorithm you want, or your parents can pick the algorithm they want,' he said. 'We don't always have to feel locked into things that we don't enjoy, that we regret, that we have all these unwanted experiences with.
'The reason why these companies have gotten so big, even in the face of many people disliking their products, is because of these network effects,' a challenge that Fiefia's bill aims to tackle and a key reason for Iyer's strong support of its success.
Hopefully, that will lead platforms to compete in a way that is of value to users, Iyer added. 'If we can get some way for consumers to move across platforms, then hopefully, they'll start competing for user value' rather than user attention.
'The tech industry's money is going to win a lot of the time, and I'm hopeful that, maybe this time, we can break through.'