Absolutely not. Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.
But a corporation should have no such leeway. Companies exist for the mutual benefit of the citizens, and their shareholders. Just because we've lost that sense of ethic doesn't make it not true.
Now, the predominant view is "A company can fuck over whomever they want, as long as it lies within the confines of the law", is preposterous. Public corporations are already required to be sociopathic, given the legal requirement of profit (exception given to benefit corps).
Or in much more shallow words, "I'll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas."
The law is the ONLY thing that curbs their bad behavior, other than publicity so bad that it (temporarily, until forgotten) causes a sales drop.
Yeah, I'd like to see more corporate death sentences handed out, as well. It may or may not deter any other bad corps, but it would cut down on second offenses :-)
Laws can either be created (legislature), or interpreted (judicial). The basis of corporate law has been founded upon the judicial branch, as well as the requirement to shareholders.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. (1919)
eBay v. Newark https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/3472 (2010)
Disproven.
Fiduciary duty is not profit optimization. It basically means you need to be responsible with the company's money. You can't spend it on hookers (well, unless that's your companies business). It's basically a "don't waste money" rule, not "earn lots of money". Basically, the idea with corporations is that the shareholders own everything and the management is taking care of all the assets; it's not the management's so the management has to be careful not to waste money.
For example, legal guardians have a fiduciary duty.
> Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.
"The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries. In its opinion, the discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto. Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19.3 million. It said the following." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.)
"Among non-experts, conventional wisdom holds that corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth. This common but mistaken belief is almost invariably supported by reference to the Michigan Supreme Court's 1919 opinion in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.[5]
Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn’t that interesting.[6]"
> eBay v. Newark
"When eBay refused to sell, Jim and Craig deliberated with outside counsel for six months about how to respond. Finally, on January 1, 2008, Jim and Craig, acting in their capacity as directors, responded by (1) adopting a rights plan that restricted eBay from purchasing additional craigslist shares and hampered eBay's ability to freely sell the craigslist shares it owned to third parties, (2) implementing a staggered board that made it impossible for eBay to unilaterally elect a director to the craigslist board, and (3) seeking to obtain a right of first refusal in craigslist's favor over the craigslist shares eBay owns by offering to issue one new share of craigslist stock in exchange for every five shares over which any craigslist stockholder granted a right of first refusal in craigslist's favor. As to the third measure, Jim and Craig accepted the right of first refusal [7] offer in their capacity as craigslist stockholders and received new shares; eBay, however, declined the offer, did not receive new shares, and had its ownership in craigslist diluted from 28.4% to 24.9%."
" eBay asserts that, in approving and implementing each measure, Jim and Craig, as directors and controlling stockholders, breached the fiduciary duties they owe to eBay as a minority stockholder of the corporation."
I didn't understand this completely but it looks like craigslist was trying to restrict eBay's usage of the stock and that's a breach of fiduciary duty because eBay is a minority shareholder of craigslist and so craigslist is harming shareholders by their actions.
> Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors the vast majority of the time.
https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism
Real world example: Tim Cook said outright, in an Apple shareholder meeting, that he did not consider the ROI on every decision. He's still CEO; to my knowledge no one has even sued over the statement.
Not saying this chain of authority micromanages every decision, but I suspect it's the rare CEO who goes out of his way to upset the board. Or is there some law that allows the CEO to say "You cannot fire me" (outside of anti-discrimination laws or such)?
How much "charity", percentage wise, do you think corporate management could actually take part in? (I don't mean P/R posing as charity costing 1% of net profit, I mean things like deciding to do something cleaner/safer which would cut net profit on a major product in half)
I doubt such treatment will come to pass anytime soon though. It's Facebooks infrastructure, and the EULA everyone agreed to gives Facebook, contractually, the power to engage in this censorship. If you don't like it, then maybe you shouldn't have agreed to their EULA which basically says all of your contents is not yours it's theirs. And this is something people who actually read these EULAs warned about and most people just gave it a hand wave as if it wouldn't actually ever be an issue.
A corporation crosses the line when it has a single person who is protected from the legal actions of the corporation by statue (i.e., a shareholder). At this point the quasi-libertarian theory of a corporation as "just a bunch of guys" completely breaks down as there is a special legal protection for shareholders.
A corporation isn't a partnership. A partnership is just a group of people who have agreed to do business together. All of them are jointly legally liable for the criminal actions and liabilities of the corporation.
A corporation, on the other hand, has legal protection for shareholders. A VC can bankroll eMurder.com and the VC isn't liable when the officers of the corporation go on a shooting spree. The options are : Investors get no special legal protection, and creditors and the law can pursue them and their personal assets for the liabilities and crimes of the corporation OR a corporation really is a special instrument of the State, and only has particular standing because we as a society believe the corporate veil provides social benefits.
But if that company decides to, say dump toxic chemicals in the waterways, it's only a few hundred thousand dollars, versus millions to dispose of them. Or if the company decides to refuse doing a recall because the cost of recall doesn't equal or exceed its liability, well, too bad.
Corporations can, and do, a great deal of harm. And many of those behaviors are collective across multiple levels and people. But yet, the most we do is a hand-slap of a fine.
Is that wrong (I think that's what you're implying)? I'm serious. More money can be used to make things safer, but there's a point where the benefits become marginal compared to the costs.
People can, and do, a great deal of harm. There's nothing in corporation that is not actions of people consisting it. Corporations are not able to do anything by themselves, there's always some person that takes specific action. "Company" never decides to dump toxic chemicals, there's always a person deciding to do it, and there's always a person doing it. At least until we invent AI, then we may have something else. Until then, there's only people all the way down.
False.
I have some sympathy with this point of view. I would like to see a world where anyone can build whatever website they want, and the amount of attention the website gets is determined by its "worth" as defined by how many people choose to use it.
However...
> The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue.
...there's the rub. The usefulness of a social network depends on how many people are already on it. Network effects mean that its very vary hard to build a competitor to Facebook or Twitter.
One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them.
This would make it a lot easier for anyone to piggyback a service on top of Facebook/Twitter/etc and if their censorship or other policies got too cumbersome, there would be much less stickyness preventing people from moving to sa competing service.
I'm genuinely glad that someone had made this point of putting public data accessible to other people after reaching critical mass.
I'm equally sad that it might never happen.
PS: There are other discussions going on having a common standard/protocol for social media communications so that it can be picked up by anyone like an email provider without locking out the people using a particular service. I'm now wondering what is stopping this from happening. FB and other private monopolies can be forced to adopt the protocol and data from them can be shared between other services like FB. How FB would react to this is whole another matter.
After all, opening up their API would completely defeat their current business model.
Except in matters of de-segregation, food and drug safety, safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women, a minimum wage, waste disposal and environmental protection, truth-in-advertising, Employment and Labor discrimination, privacy of employees and customers, and licensure of trades...
The reason I'm asking is that if a Facebook user decided to send out full instructions about how make a pneumonia virus with home dna equipment, for example, how would you feel about that?
Let's say they were in another country where they law couldn't or wouldn't stop them? Is it ok for Facebook to keep distributing the information in its walled garden?
Your statement is "a priori" false.
We place limits on private businesses all the time over issues relating to discrimination, employment benefits, etc.
An entity that has that much influence over public discourse almost certainly does needed to be overseen.
If an entity has no say what another entity can do within some domain, then the first entity is not the government with respect to the domain, and (assuming that no other entity has such a say), the latter is the government.