Deckchairs
Some laudably intended and even slightly tech-literate suggestions in there—something of a miracle coming from a politician—but I still think we're fiddling with deckchairs here, tinkering at the margins with rules that will have, at best, incremental benefits.
I've suggested before and will say it again: we need to deal with the two fundamental problems that were virtually built in to social media right from the outset: free services; and anonymity.
Dealing with anonymity first: it's beyond obvious that a large minority of people are cowardly lice who wouldn't have dared to scream their hate, bigotry and ignorance in public 20 years ago. Now they can be anonymous cowards of the worst kind, spewing their bile here and there, and worse, nucleating an audience of like-"minded" wretches who raise the temperature of their own little echo chamber until they are repeating increasingly hysterical nonsense to each other and believing it. There were and are abundant reasons not to want Hillary as president, but the infantile garbage about Pizzagate, twisted stories about the Foundation, the incessant lies and conspiracy nonsense ... a sizable chunk of the social media using public sounded like mental patients.
I accept that the loss of anonymity will have some consequences too, but the price of it is too high: it is too much of a shield for people who, in truth, should be too scared to spout their filth in public, for fear of entirely justified opprobrium.
As to "free", perhaps it is radical, but I believe governments should create and enforce a ban on any non-government entity from collecting, holding, processing or analysing any user data that is not strictly required for operational usage. Go back to the bare bones of name, address, recent orders, payments, delivery options, complaints and fixes. Nothing else. No profiling, no selling of customer data, no deep analyses, nada.
This means that Facebook, Google and the other parasites will have to earn revenue in another way: they'll have to charge for their services. It needn't be expensive. Perhaps £20/year for Facebook? A tenner buys you credit for 5,000 Google searches? And suddenly the users, instead of being the product and treated like mugs, become customers, with a right to privacy and dignity.
I suspect that a lot of mostly good things would flow from such enforcement, some of them surprising: for example, competition would open up. Advertising would become more expensive and would therefore have to improve: driven from the current atrocious standards, which are even worse than radio, to something more like a good TV channel, where ads are sometimes even funny, and clever.
I understand why this notion will attract a lot of initial and reasonable scepticism, but I have the feeling that if smart people put their thinking caps on and address the deep systemic flaws that make the web such a toxic place these days ... great improvements might yet be possible,