DPCC Co-Chair Cicilline: Democrats Are Focusing On Protecting Consumers
WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman David Cicilline, Co-Chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee (DPCC), appeared on All in with Chris Hayes on MSNBC to discuss how Democrats will protect the privacy interests of Americans and the need to get money out of the political system. House Democrats will deliver for the people – lowering health care costs, increasing pay and cleaning up corruption in Washington. Below are excerpts from the interview. Click here to watch the video.
"Well, I think the story is very, very disturbing. It's an example of what happens with his tremendous concentration of economic power, which is very often accompanied with a concentration of political power. And, Democrats ran on a commitment to really understand and focus on this issue. We've seen these megamergers continue, this tremendous concentration of economic power. And, the impact it's having on consumers and on privacy and on the marketplace are significant. So, we need to understand what happened here. We need to be doing everything we can to prevent it from happening. And, there are not easy solutions to this, but we ought to begin with serious hearings to understand exactly what happened here and then we need to begin to really develop some policies that will respond to this. There's a lot of smart people that have begun to think about this. There aren't easy answers, but we should all be very disturbed about the revelations in that reporting about the behavior of Facebook and their not only slow walking this, but engaging in the sort of political campaign to distract and dissuade and minimize what are some very serious issues of misconduct. So, this is a serious issue and we have to focus on protecting consumers' privacy, think about the rights of consumers to protect their data and we've got to force companies like Facebook to be much more transparent about what's going on."
"I think this is just an example of why we've got to get money out of our political system so that folks can no longer be influenced by people who are making contributions to campaigns and really focus on developing good public policy. And this, you know, when you have the kind of economic power and the concentration of economic power that you see in a company like Facebook, it's very often accompanied by a strong political power. And, so we've got to break that connection and get money out of our political system. And, you know, I think that's going to be an important priority for Democrats. We've got a whole reform package to really address that issue. But, this – this question about the behavior of this company and the way it's impacting the privacy interests of Americans and the consumers' right to make sure that their data is protected is very serious."
"Absolutely. We need to have comprehensive hearings. I think you will see Democrats take a very active role in the House on getting to the bottom of this. We have a responsibility to get answers for the American people and to begin to think about solutions. These are very disturbing developments. What people expect from us is to bring those individuals before the committee, those companies to learn what happened to make sure we're thinking about solutions proactively to prevent these kinds of things from happening again, to protect data, protect privacy, think of competition-based solutions. We are going to be very vigorous in our oversight of this and really work in a collaborative way to come up with solutions to solve problem."