The predominance of a few Big Tech companies presents two kinds of challenges for Congress. First, companies such as Facebook (now Meta) and Google (now Alphabet) have created certain problems that Congress can and should alleviate through specific, targeted legislation. But second, the rise of these tech giants has highlighted problems that Congress itself created, and for those problems, the legislative task is to improve government itself.

The problems of social media, a realm that is now two decades old, have become all too familiar. In the initial years of Facebook — founded in 2004, it was one of the earliest social-media companies but not the first — a light regulatory touch was prudent. But with the passage of time, government should learn from experience. And with every passing year, it is harder to ignore the palpable and well-documented negative effects that social media have on our culture, and especially on our children.

Congress should act accordingly to pass legislation aimed at the tech companies. As Christine Rosen recently wrote in these pages (“Keep Them Offline,” June 27), “we have enough evidence of the harms and dangers of social-media use by children, as well as plenty of examples of the lack of concern demonstrated by the companies profiting from children’s use of the platforms,” to justify a blunt but urgent solution: “Social-media use should be limited by law to adults, or at the very least to people 16 years old and older.” At minimum, Congress should require specific parental consent for the companies’ collection of data from underage users; as Yuval Levin wrote recently for the New York Times, Congress can raise the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’s minimum age from 13 to 18 and require age verification for the companies’ collection of data from young users.

Similarly, and more broadly, Congress should take a hard look at the tech giants’ reach into elementary- and high-school classrooms. Google, in particular, has transformed American education with a tidal wave of Chromebooks and Google apps. Has this improved students’ education? Or are the companies themselves the main beneficiaries as they gather students’ information and on-ramp an entire generation of kids into the companies’ own suites of accounts and apps? Congress should investigate these questions and consider modernizing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act so that it places stricter limits on schools’ willingness to connect students with tech companies. Or Congress might consider whether federal financial support for elementary and secondary education should be conditioned in ways that could moderate schools’ hasty integration of Big Tech companies into classrooms; at the very least, Congress’s investigation might help to inform the states’ and local school districts’ choices.

Congress should also take steps to limit the Chinese government’s access to American social-media users’ information. Here, the problem is primarily TikTok, a conduit for users’ information to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Klon Kitchen has persistently documented, TikTok’s assurances of privacy for American users ring hollow amid ongoing news that ByteDance’s China-based employees “have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users,” as BuzzFeed News reported in June. This is not shocking news — indeed, to believe that the Chinese Communist Party is not exploiting China’s most successful technological conduit to Americans’ personal information requires a certain naïveté — but it heightens the urgency of a domestic-policy response. President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order prohibiting TikTok (and WeChat and other Chinese apps) from transferring Americans’ data to Chinese parent companies; rather than rely on a future executive order, Congress should take the initiative by legislating specific, binding requirements along similar lines.

But beyond these targeted reforms, the legislative task at hand becomes more daunting.

The main policy debates around the tech giants have to do with their sheer size and power — their market power and their power over information. Bipartisan rumblings for reform range from efforts to intensify antitrust regulation of the tech giants’ activities and corporate acquisitions to proposals for amending the 1996 Telecommunications Act’s Section 230, which gives immunity to Internet-platform companies for some of the third-party content they display and for some of their editorial judgments.

Some critics of Big Tech companies — even among those normally skeptical of heavy-handed regulations — are calling for social-media platforms to be regulated as “common carriers,” an approach that raises significant First Amendment issues but that might be more suitable for companies further down “the stack”: the cloud servers, payment facilitators, and other services that undergird the user-facing layers of modern Internet services.

Yet above all, translating general concerns about Big Tech’s “bigness” into meaningful legislation requires difficult decisions about which companies and conduct actually need to be regulated. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, for example, would limit the largest Internet-platform companies’ ability to acquire other companies. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would prohibit specific ways by which a large Internet-platform company might leverage its control of the platform to give its own products and services an advantage over competitors on the same platform.

Congress should not race to enact these or any other bills. Lawmakers should consider this a generational turning point and enact legislation that will provide a solid new foundation for the next several decades in tech policy. That kind of landmark legislation requires serious study and debate.

Still, the virtue of these bills, so far, is their specificity. Whereas a century ago Congress wrote the first antitrust laws in extremely broad terms, leaving regulatory agencies with immense discretion, the recent tech legislation would have Congress itself prescribe rules, providing a much clearer and stabler legal environment for these companies.

Some of the tech giants’ critics prefer the earlier approach: Regulators with immense discretion could react much more quickly and creatively to the companies’ latest actions. But the companies’ power in our day-to-day lives ought to make Congress warier of agency discretion, lest it empower those agencies — and their political supporters — to leverage their regulatory authority over those consequential companies for partisan ends. In an era when politicians constantly demand that Internet platforms stifle or promote speech, it is all the more incumbent on Congress to legislate clear rules that constrain not just the platform companies but also the regulators.

And in constraining regulators, Congress’s policy agenda should look to another regulatory agency that has contributed significantly to the tech giants’ modern power: the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ideally, start-up companies would look for opportunities to compete with the big incumbents. But instead, start-ups often look to the tech giants as their best chance to cash out.

“Regulators and antitrust advocates are particularly worried about acquisitions by Silicon Valley giants,” the Washington Post reported last fall. When the Federal Trade Commission released its recent study of the Big Tech companies’ acquisitions, Lina Khan, its activist chairwoman, emphasized “the extent to which these firms have devoted tremendous resources to acquiring start-ups, patent portfolios, and entire teams of technologists.” One should not overstate the point; Benedict Evans, one of the keenest tech analysts, emphasizes that the FTC’s own data show that the vast majority of successful start-ups are not acquired by Big Tech. But there is reason to worry that Big Tech’s acquisitions will become more significant, owing in no small part to the government’s own lapses.

A generation ago, a tech start-up’s ideal “liquidity event” would be an initial public offering (IPO); today, the more attractive option for start-ups is to stay private longer with assistance from venture capitalists or to get acquired. As Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists, has been warning for nearly a decade, this trend against IPOs is exacerbated by the regulatory environment in place since Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, in the aftermath of Enron and WorldCom. “The East Coast mentality to prevent these big blowups basically implemented a set of reforms that had the effect of punishing start-ups,” he explained in an interview last year. “The result of that was the start-ups basically said, okay, fine, we just won’t go public. We don’t need to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley and all this other stuff if we don’t go public as early.” The result is “this phenomenon where all these private companies just started staying private a lot longer, but they needed the financing, obviously, that they would have gotten once they had gone public or done secondary and corporate market.”

This is not all bad, of course. The prospect of an acquisition by Alphabet or Meta surely inspires at least some start-ups to innovate and attract the incumbents’ attention, and that innovation is a good thing. Yet it is not clear that the best innovations come from innovators aiming to attract the tech giants’ attention; at the very least, it exacerbates the antitrust trends that Khan and others criticize.

And the SEC is poised to make things even worse. Chairman Gary Gensler is pressing an agenda to expand the agency’s regulatory burdens beyond public markets to private capital. If it succeeds, then the agency will point even more start-ups toward the other pot of money: their would-be acquirers, the tech giants.

Any congressional policy agenda for Big Tech needs to keep this regulatory problem squarely in view. Congress should investigate whether the SEC’s regulatory burdens are exacerbating the trends that the FTC seeks to regulate against, and then it should modernize the securities laws accordingly. And it should legislate reforms to encourage tech start-ups to seek their fortunes in public markets, not in the tech giants’ deep pockets.

The best check against Big Tech will be start-up tech, not big government. Congress shouldn’t obsess over punishing the tech giants; it should focus on facilitating capital markets that reward innovators and create competition. To reform Big Tech, start with reforming the regulators.

That, in turn, will require Congress to reform itself, by rebuilding its own capacity for legislation — and for oversight of the regulatory agencies — on highly complex technical subjects.