White House holding roundtable on Big Tech concerns

The White House is pictured from the West Wing Driveway in Washington, US, February 10, 2022. REUTERS/Tom Brenner

WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (Reuters) – The White House on Thursday is holding a roundtable meeting on a number of technology issues hearing from experts on antitrust, privacy, algorithmic discrimination and other areas of tech policy, a senior administration official said on Twitter.

White House competition adviser Tim Wu on Twitter confirmed the meeting reported earlier by Axios.

A familiar source told Reuters the meeting includes senior officials from a number of White House offices and is “focused on addressing the problems with tech platform accountability.”

The meeting is reviewing “various areas including competition; privacy; youth mental health; misinformation and disinformation; illegal and abusive conduct, including sexual exploitation; and algorithmic discrimination and lack of transparency.”

Congress has been considering a bill to rein in Big Tech. Supporters have been pressing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to schedule a vote on the bill that would ban self-preferring by Big Tech platforms like Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google.

Reporting by Diane Bartz, Nandita Bose and David Shepardson

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