How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.” 

I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. ears of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real.

Washington spent the better part of 2018 talking tough to tech companies and threatening a crackdown on the wanton collection, dissemination, and monetization of personal data. But all of that was just prelude. The real privacy showdown is slated for 2019. Tech giants are racing the clock to supersede California’s law with a more industry-friendly federal bill. There will likley be a point of contention between industry lobbyists and consumer rights groups like the ACLU, which argue that states should be free to pass stricter rules if a federal bill doesn't go far enough.  Another key question is how any sort of federal legislation would be enforced. In Washington, industry groups hope to leave enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission. Critics of that approach say that the FTC has too little authority to impose meaningful penalties on companies, and that it's failed to act on what authority it does have.

The task of reconciling the differences between businesses, advocacy groups, and members of Congress will likely fall to the leadership of the Senate and House Commerce Committees. Just who will run those committees is still an open question. Sen John Thune (R-SD), who serves as chair of the Senate committee, is set to step down from the role, while Sen Bill Nelson (D-FL) recently lost his reelection bid, opening up his seat as ranking member of the committee. And now that Republicans have lost the majority in the House, Democrats who have recently been critical of Big Tech will be taking the big chairs. On the House Commerce Committee, that will fall to Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), while Rep Jerry Nadler (D-NY) is poised to lead the House Judiciary Committee.