Hi all, it's Eric. There are authorities cracking down on gambling in children's video games. Just not the ones that you elected.
Well, Congress is thinking about doing something. Senator Josh Hawley proposed a bill that would ban the sale of loot boxes. Hawley and his co-sponsors are worried about the proliferation of these animated crates filled with in-game goodies, which cost real-world money. Like a deck of trading cards, loot boxes dish out unexciting rewards far more often than they do rarer, cooler ones.
But the possibility of getting a rare payoff pushes some players—including children—to spend hundreds of dollars chasing, say, a must-have new digital costume for their favorite character.
The bill has gained bipartisan support. But who knows when, if ever, it will actually become law. The U.S. Congress moves slowly, by design.
Alphabet Inc.'s Google, on the other hand, is the absolute ruler over one of the biggest digital app stores in the world. It is the vassal of Android games, and as such, can make unilateral decrees over every one it hosts. And so—following its rival regent Apple Inc.'s cue—Google has decided game makers on its platform must disclose the odds of winning a prize in a loot box. It was a small victory for anyone worried about the proliferation of these gambling mechanisms in video games.
This kind of corporate policymaking has become commonplace. Tech companies, not lawmakers, are now writing the rules for an ever-increasing portion of users' everyday lives. For example, Uber Technologies Inc. decides what history of legal trouble is acceptable for its ride-hailing drivers. On questions ranging from safety to speech, technology companies are stepping in to decide thorny questions for all of us.
We accept this—even demand it—from our largest companies. In many cases, Americans now expect companies to be intervene where regulators are absent. A debate is raging online about whether Facebook Inc. should have done more to crack down on a fake video of Nancy Pelosi that makes her seem drunk or worse. Facebook cut down on the distribution of the video—but should it have kept it up at all? Facebook is under pressure to delete the Pelosi video—both from columnists in the New York Times and from Pelosi herself.
Uber, meanwhile, is preparing this year to disclose information about dangerous incidents like sexual assaults that occur in Uber vehicles. Cynically, you might say that the company is just trying to get ahead of regulators on the issue. Though, in this case, Uber seems to have gone above and beyond. Sure, maybe a city here or there might have demanded data on car accidents. But with its platform-wide policy, Uber stayed out in front of legislators.
This type of action may make life easier around the edges, but there are two big problems in pressuring technology companies to self-regulate. First, we're handing over some key democratic decisions to companies that are often controlled by a small handful of people. As a result, as tech companies grow—and the same, small number of people remain at their helms—there is an anti-democratic creep in American decision-making. As the digital world becomes a vital reality of its own, the forces that control it by fiat become ever more powerful.
Second, there's a risk that's not novel to the tech industry: When companies make their own rules, they're often half-measures meant to mitigate the need for government to step in. The movie industry, for example, self-regulated because it didn't want the government to do something more draconian. That probably turned out for the best. But it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which it wouldn't.
As Uber decides what incident information to release, it gets to pick what it reveals and what it doesn't. And the company will presumably retain control over the underlying data. Meanwhile, when it comes to loot boxes, Google isn't banning them; it's just making companies tell you how long your odds are. I'm sure young children will think about those probabilities long and hard before using their parents' credit card.—Eric Newcomer
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