Davos
As more and more technology companies are being born and quickly assuming gigantic proportions within no time, regulating them is the need of the hour, top global company executives stressed here on Tuesday.
“When CEOs abdicate responsibility, you have no choice but to bring in regulators. Trust has to be the most important value in companies. If it’s not, something the company will find itself in trouble,” Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said during a panel discussion on the first day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) here.
Martin Sorrell, founder and CEO at WPP — the world’s largest ad company — said companies like Alibaba and Tencent have grown in no time to a gigantic scale.
- Martin Sorrell | founder and CEO at WPP
“The question now arises is that whether such firms need regulation on not,” Sorrell told the gathering.
Big companies like Google and Facebook are today hiring people to monitor their editorial content.
“Are Google and Facebook media or tech companies? The Silicon Valley giants have yet to acknowledge that they’re media owners,” Sorrell added.
Alphabet (that owns Google) CFO Ruth Porat said that platforms such as Google open up the world to people, creating opportunities for them.
“Trust is all about creating quality products and making real information accessible for people. Our platforms open the doors for developers. Trillion of searches are being done on Google. We have a duty for our users and publishers to create more opportunities for them,” Porat said.
“Why do we trust technology? It’s because it continues to help us solve some of the world’s most intractable issues such as tackling diseases,” she added.
Rachel Botsman, a leading writer and thinker, said that a great trust shift is happening today.
“This is called a distributed form of trust, not the top-down hierarchical one. Regulations till date are designed for the top-down hierarchy. The world now needs regulations for new tech platforms,” she added.
