https://regulatorycapturelab.ca Regulatory Capture Lab Fri, 14 Jan 2022 19:33:28 +0000 https://regulatorycapturelab.ca en https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Landing Wed, 12 Jan 2022 15:10:07 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Landing Regulatory capture is a reality&nbsp; AND IT’S HAPPENING HERE IN CANADA. READ THE REGULATORY CAPTURE LAB’S WORK ON&nbsp;THE REVOLVING DOOR, ACADEMIC CAPTURE, AND MORE. &nbsp; https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-1 Wed, 12 Jan 2022 15:10:07 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-1 01. WHEN PUBLIC POLICY is enacted in the interest of private industry, rather than in the public interest, that’s regulatory capture. Though such tactics might seem complex or sophis­ticated, in reality they’re simple to observe. The Regulatory Capture Lab examines this capture, why it happens and how. https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-2 Wed, 12 Jan 2022 16:39:17 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-2 02. CAPTURE HAPPENS in a wide range of industries, from oil and agribusiness to finance. Big Tech is no different. Researchers have identified the ways in which Big Tech enacts capture in the United States and Europe. The same patterns are emerging in Canada, although they’ve often escaped public scrutiny. https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-3 Wed, 12 Jan 2022 16:47:10 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Core-Statement-3 03. IT LARGELY happens in plain sight.Regulatory capture is easy to track if you know where to look. In large measure it happens through academic capture and&nbsp;the revolving door of employment between government and the private sector. https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Our-Initial-Research Wed, 12 Jan 2022 18:17:15 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Our-Initial-Research Our initial research focus is on the influence of foreign tech firms on Canadian public policy both in the federal government and in academia. CAPTURE IN CANADA THE REVOLVING DOOR ACADEMIC CAPTURE https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Why-focus-on-Big-Tech Fri, 14 Jan 2022 19:33:28 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Why-focus-on-Big-Tech WHY FOCUS ON FOREIGN BIG TECH? It’s urgent Canadians look at how foreign Big Tech operates in Canada, to ensure that decisions are being made in the public interest. Big Tech has more than tripled its lobbying efforts since 2015. Regulatory capture is also likely to happen through the revolving door, where a “tight-knit circle of actors” move between the public and private sectors while nudging policy. According to American research, such movements can be a better indicator of capture than the money spent on lobbying.Read our Canadian research on the revolving door and the Big Tech firms that power it—from Alphabet to Facebook, Palantir, and Uber. <img width="10200" height="3720" width_o="10200" height_o="3720" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e466eab6cb89c8efef34bd40d4c6d988cb0f38adeef2147e41e650a673c0d6f3/RegCapLab-The-Revolving-Door-December-2021-thumbnail.jpg" data-mid="130396699" border="0" data-scale="100" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e466eab6cb89c8efef34bd40d4c6d988cb0f38adeef2147e41e650a673c0d6f3/RegCapLab-The-Revolving-Door-December-2021-thumbnail.jpg" /> https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Glossary-Media-Library Thu, 13 Jan 2022 18:55:47 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Glossary-Media-Library GLOSSARY,&nbsp;MEDIA&nbsp;LIBRARY https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/big-tech-capture-in-canada Wed, 12 Jan 2022 23:06:59 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/big-tech-capture-in-canada Capture in Canada Regulatory capture is well documented in Canada’s traditional industries, wherein public policy is directed away from the public interest and toward the private. RESEARCH WHEN IT COMES TO BIG TECH’S influence with policymakers and regulators, the stakes are extra­ordinarily high. In some of the areas in which tech companies operate there is no regula­tion or historical precedent for framing their offerings or their business models. In other areas, tech compa­nies have upended traditional business models in such a way as to make current regula­tion inadequate or obso­lete, whereas other forms of regu­lation are adequate and yet tech companies do not abide by them. These companies are now among the world’s most wealthy and powerful in the history of capitalism, with tenden­cies toward monopolistic beha­viours that have led to an ongoing wave of investigation and litigation from governments and civil society. The stakes are high because tech com­panies’ impacts and interests, whether current or potential, now reach into nearly every corner of citizens’ lives. And they present a unique challenge for regulation, as their activities can hardly be contained within a single port­folio, but rather extend across the purview of numerous government depart­ments, commissions, and policy areas, including but not limited to: consu­mer and citizen privacy; antitrust and compe­ti­tion; innova­tion policy; labour; online harms; digital taxa­tion; heritage and culture; copyright law; and immigration policy. Research into Canadian capture The Regulatory Capture Lab’s initial research is focused on two areas of capture: The Revolving Door and Academic Capture. Research on the revolving door will track the ongoing shuffle of actors between the Canadian public sector and Big Tech, and research on academic capture will look at how Big Tech’s support for academia risks compromi­sing the integrity of scholarship. There are other areas of interest, such as journalism and media capture, that will be worth studying in the future. How does regulatory capture impact Canadian life? As we track the underlying mechanisms of regulatory capture in Canada, we encourage other journalists and academics to use our work as a starting point to look more closely at capture and how it plays out in contested regulatory spaces. To start, here are two important areas worth investigating further: URBAN MOBILITY – From rideshare services to autonomous vehicles that move through urban spaces kitted out with a panoptic array of technologies, Big Tech has a massive vested interest in the regulatory landscape of how people navigate “smart” urban environments. Policy decisions made now in areas such as data gover­nance, gig worker rights, AV permissions, and technological procurement will have ramifi­ca­tions for a long time to come. One of the clearest examples of how private interests are inscribed into public policy was when Uber’s “Flexible Work+” labour policy made its way almost verbatim into Erin O’Toole’s 2021 federal election platform for the Conservative Party of Canada. This comes as no surprise since Uber lobbyist Dan Mader was also serving as O’Toole’s director of policy and scripting. DATA AND PRIVACY – The indiscriminate collection of data is at the core of Big Tech’s business model. This is why privacy regulation is critical to companies operating in a data-driven economy. It’s why Big Tech spends so much effort trying to influence privacy policy. Those efforts were on clear display in the Liberal government’s long awaited update to privacy policy, introduced in November 2020 as the Digital Charter Implementation Act. If Facebook, Google or Amazon could write privacy policy, it would read like the Digital Charter does. Not only has the government expanded tech companies’ rights to track citizens, it has also stripped away pre-existing rights for children and vulnerable persons. This is perhaps no coin­ci­dence considering Facebook and others are currently trying to develop new tech products for kids. Consequences and opportunity costs. As regulatory capture happens, policy and regulation are oriented away from the public good and toward private interests. The consequences of capture can be seen, for example, in how the energy and mining sectors have been historically successful at circum­venting, under­mining, or watering down environ­mental policies and pro­tect­ions. Over time, the capa­city of govern­ments to enact and enforce policy in the public good is eroded. The “revolving door” only needs to spin once for it to work, espe­cially in sectors and policy areas opened up by Big Tech and when the government lacks the institutional or practical knowledge to address such areas. In a recent paper on the Canadian revolving door by Stéphanie Yates and Étienne Cardin-Trudeau, a key finding was “that ‘cultural capture’ can occur when new public officers come from the same private sector now within their purview. Based on public officers’ alle­gian­ce to their former industry, lobbying is de facto exerted, ‘from within’.” This invites potential conflicts of interest within the government itself. The scale and outsized influence of Big Tech distorts the playing field for smaller domestic competitors, putting them at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to having their voice heard in govern­ment and with regulatory bodies. There is an opportunity for Canada to establish its own framework for trans­parency when it comes to partner­ships between Big Tech, academics, and univer­sities, underscoring the necessary inde­pen­dence and integrity of academic research. This work is needed before a patch­work of unsatisfactory, self-policing norms settle into place. ︎ https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Glossary-Media-Library-copy Thu, 13 Jan 2022 06:58:48 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/Glossary-Media-Library-copy GLOSSARY, MEDIA&nbsp;LIBRARY https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/big-tech-revolving-door Thu, 13 Jan 2022 01:45:12 +0000 Regulatory Capture Lab https://regulatorycapturelab.ca/big-tech-revolving-door The Revolving Door &nbsp; Studying the ongoing shuffle of professional actors between the Canadian public sector and foreign technology firms. RESEARCH THE “REVOLVING DOOR” OF EMPLOY­MENT is one of the better-observed mechanisms of regulatory capture across all industrial sectors. Career paths which move back and forth between the public and private sectors increase the poten­tial for regulation to orient away from the public interest and towards the private. Also, as regu­latory bodies typically require those with exper­tise in the regulated area, its pool of experts are often drawn from former employees of the regulated industry, making clear the potential for conflicts of interest. Historically, this revolving door has served many people well profes­sionally. Big Tech has more than tripled its lobbying efforts in Canada since Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, even as lobbying in other sectors has decreased. Meanwhile, the “shadow public service” of private consul­tancies remains a strong influence. Movements through the revol­ving door, however, are both under scruti­nized and under regulated. According to American research, such movements can be a much better indi­ca­tor of succes­s­ful capture than the amounts of money directly spent on lobbying. While lobbying records make formal interactions between compa­nies and government available for public scrutiny, staff movements allow subtler and more organic forms of capture to occur. The revolving door is not about individuals on their own career paths — there’s nothing inhe­rently nefarious about interesting professional trajec­tories — but rather the sum effect of what Stéphanie Yates and Étienne Cardin-Trudeau refer to as a “tight-knit circle of actors”. This circle quietly nudges policy through instinct or deli­be­rate action, sometimes proposing regu­lation that could have come from their former employer’s wishlist, or else cultivating particular expectations of “how things should be done” that emerge from private sector positions more so than public benefits. Regardless of intent, confidence in regulation is fundamentally under­mined by the presence of the revolving door. To give one recent example, when assessing the Canadian Radio-television and Tele­communication Commis­sion’s recent reversal of its 2019 decision on wholesale rates, can Cana­dians be confident in the neutrality of Commis­sion Chair Ian Scott, a former Telus Vice-President? Career paths that move between key positions in foreign Big Tech and the Canadian public sector <img width="9408" height="3720" width_o="9408" height_o="3720" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9b95a1738353d2f8e2be38625397c2115d1da7ff3e18603a9cebb0fa549f415/RegCapLab-The-Revolving-Door-December-2021.jpg" data-mid="131016394" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a9b95a1738353d2f8e2be38625397c2115d1da7ff3e18603a9cebb0fa549f415/RegCapLab-The-Revolving-Door-December-2021.jpg" /> ︎ &nbsp;Private sector ︎ &nbsp;Public sector Sources: Public records from the federal Registry of Lobbyists, LinkedIn, and journalism articles. Data as of December 2021. Yellow represents the academic sector, non-profits, and think tanks. Grey represents missing data. While the United States has initiatives such as The Revolving Door Project and the Tech Trans­parency Project that track movements between the private and public sectors, to date there has been little examination or scholarship on the migration of Canadian government staff to and from the Big Tech companies and the consult­ancies that represent them. Our research aims to address this gap by docu­men­ting key movements through the revolving door by real people and related to the following tech companies: Alphabet (including Google and Sidewalk Labs), Amazon, Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Palantir, Starlink (including Tesla and Space X), TikTok, and Uber. Contact us at&nbsp; info@regulatorycapturelab.ca for more information. Three ways through the revolving door 01. THE “EXIT” STAGE Government staffers leave or “exit” public office for a private position, whether to work as an employee or as a lobbyist for a company or sector recently within their regulatory purview. They often leave to take on senior policy, communi­cation, or strategy roles. Currently, the exit stage is the only revolving door move covered by the Lobbying Act, which does not account for instances when a private company doesn’t consider their new employee’s lobbying work to account for more than 20% of their total workload. In the Registry of Lobbyists for example, Face­book’s Canadian Head of Public Policy, Kevin Chan, is not registered as a company lobbyist per se, merely noted as a “Senior Officer”. Chan previously worked for the Liberal Party of Canada, including as Director of Policy to Michael Ignatieff, and was Director of Policy and Research at the Office of the Privacy Commis­sioner. The Commissioner oversees compliance with the Personal Infor­ma­tion Protection and Electronic Documents Act, a federal law that governs how private companies like Facebook collect, use, and disclose Canadians’ personal data. 02. THE “ENTRY” STAGE Private sector executives leave their positions to join or “enter” the public office tasked with regulating their former sector. Significantly, the Lobbying Act does not cover the entry stage into public office. Consider Leslie Church. In 2015, she left her role as Head of Communications and Public Affairs at Google to join the Liberal Party of Canada’s back office. She served as a Chief of Staff in multiple departments, including the Minister of Canadian Heritage, a key ministry in the regulating, funding, and taxation of digital content, including content on Google’s YouTube. Church is currently Director of Policy for Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. 03. THE “CIRCULAR” There’s a reason the door is revolving: it’s not unheard of for someone to move from the private to the public sector then back to the private sector again, bringing with them their know­ledge from the government but more importantly their contacts. Among those who have studied regulatory capture in other sectors, the indi­vidual typically returns to the same company, sector, or as a lobbyist for the same company or sector. The patterns we see emerging with Big Tech suggests it is useful to consider not only those who “exit” the public service for the company they came from, but also those who exit to work as lobbyists or consultants on behalf of their former company or sector (see “shadow public service”). Similarly, sometimes individuals leave the private sector to work on party leadership or election campaigns, or hold an official position within a political party. These mouvements sometimes amount to the same thing: efforts on behalf of a company or sector to influence public policy and regulation. ︎ Key readings on the revolving door September 2021 Erin O’Toole’s Plan For Gig Workers Was ‘Carbon Copied’ From Uber’s Corporate Lobbyists&nbsp; Press Progress A look at how the Conservative Party of Canada’s most recent election platform on the protection of gig workers was strikingly similar to the position Uber had been lobbying for. This is hardly a coincidence when Dan Mader, previously a registered lobbyist for Uber, served as O’Toole’s director of scripting and policy. O’Toole’s platform promises that a Conservative government would require app-based companies like Uber, Lyft, and Skip the Dishes to make contributions to an Employee Savings Account every time they pay workers. Workers would be able to with­draw from these funds ‘as needed’. [...] What O’Toole doesn’t mention is that his proposal aligns with Uber’s lobbying to change provincial labour laws around worker classification. September 2021 How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim, The New York Times Drucker and Hakim trace the cynical use of the “circular” revolving door move by Big Accounting firms in the United States. The firms place their lawyers in key positions within the Treasury for a couple of years, swaying key tax decisions of benefit to their clients, before returning to the firm as planned. “Lawyers who come from the private sector need to learn who their new client is, and it’s not their former clients. It’s the American public,” said Stephen Shay, a retired tax partner at Ropes &amp; Gray who served in the Treasury during the Reagan and Obama administrations. “A certain percentage of people never make that switch. It’s really hard to make that switch when you know where you are going back in two years, and it’s to your old clients. The incentives are bad.” June 2021 Lobbying “from within”: A new perspective on the revolving door and regulatory capture Stéphanie Yates and Étienne Cardin-Trudeau, Canadian Public Administration One of the most useful studies to date of the revolving door in Canada, based on primary research undertaken in Quebec with public officers who have been through the door themselves. A key finding is that “cultural capture” can occur when new public officers come from the same private sector now within their purview. Based on public officers’ allegiance to their former industry, lobbying is de facto exerted, “from within”. Despite clear irregu­la­ri­ties and conflicts of interest, most of those inter­viewed do not believe in tightening rules and prefer continuing with vigilance from public office holders, journalists, and other observers. May 2018 Web of familiar faces connects government with online giants Vito Pilieci, Ottawa Citizen&nbsp; Pilieci surveys the revolving movements between the Liberal backrooms and technology companies as it pertains to pending regulatory reform. As all the companies point out to Pilieci, there’s nothing going on here that’s outside of current rules. Crucial decisions are looming on the digital landscape in Canada, giving these connections added relevance. Billions of dollars are likely on the line for compa­nies and for taxpayers. ︎