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>Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are doing?

Because you can't serve two masters. For-profit corporations are going to side with profit over privacy when they conflict.

>The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.

That $20 isn't just for costs it's also for profit. How cheaply could Facebook run if it didn't have to return any money to it's shareholders? That's a major case for either a non-profit or a nationalized service.

>whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT.

Well here let's put it like this. When you leave something up to the $MARKET you should remember that 'literally anybody' (including Donald Trump) is a valid expansion of the term $MARKET. With government at least there is some (admittedly meager) level of democratic accountability. How much accountability is there in the market? I think we've seen how these privacy violations play out with Equifax already. Richard Smith, Mark Begor, Mark Zuckerberg these people are just interchangeable names/faces and no matter who you swap in and out of these roles the desires of a corporation in the market place to maintain and increase profitability will weigh on them the same. I prefer a system where these people are directly accountable to the people ie nationalized services, not a system where their accountability is obfuscated and mediated by the market.

"How much accountability is there in the market?"

You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?

Neither side, on its own, is sufficient. A system where both sides are doing their job is way better.

Mind you, I have some compassion (for lack of a better word) for the government not regulating Facebook, on the grounds that to a first-order approximation, nobody saw how bad this was going to be in advance. Local commentators may vigorously object to this characterization, to which I'd reply that the concentration of the people who did see it coming (including, least of all, myself) is sky-high here compared to the general public.

>You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?

I'll admit I am proposing a black/white dichotomy in this instance. I don't do that for all markets but I do in this one. To me a free market is best when we really want the market to race to the bottom quickly and there are few externalities or complicating factors. This is very rare. A regulated market is best when there are complicating factors and externalities but we still want to engage in a race to the bottom. This is very common. Removing the market entirely is best when we don't want to race to the bottom. This is rare. Even though it's rare, I cannot think of a better example than Social Media. Facebook and these other companies have utilized mostly free markets to race to the bottom, we've made 95% of the gains already. Now Facebook is exposing it's users to all sorts of nasty costs that society does not want to bear in order to squeeze out profit. This is not being caused by some one-off feature of the market, it is being caused by the central feature of the market, profit motive. The only way to fix these problems are to remove profit motive. That means either nationalization or non-profit status.

Here's two quotes from a recent Tim Wu interview that I think speak to what I'm trying to say here:

>They're not. But, well, that's the problem. I think there's a sort of intrinsic problem with having for-profit entities with this business model in this position of so much public trust because they're always at the edge because their profitability depends on it.

>Well, if Mark Zuckerberg is telling the truth when he says, what I care about is connecting people to their families and friends, that's a very lofty ambition. If that's what he really wants to do, he can do it. But it doesn't mean he'll be the most profitable company in the world. You know, utilities - which is what Facebook is, a social utility - have never been understood as profit centers before. [...] And there's a reason. The social sphere is a little bit different. And maybe we need to accept that it's not a source of major profit to be in people's personal lives.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597221954/facebook-previously...

I'm with you on the absurdity of asking government to do this. There are very few governments worldwide that have managed to produce tolerable, let alone enjoyable and useful citizen facing software. Let alone the privacy implications for literally communicating through government servers...

That said, I think the argument for a 'paid facebook' breaks down quickly when you realise that as a communications / event planning / promotion tool, it's usefulness is directly tied to its network size. This was true even in the earliest days, but FB cleverly circumvented the difficulty of building a core network by providing it to college campuses, where a hyper real world socially networked group of people were more than willing to try the latest thing. They pulled of the trick of making it both free and exclusive simultaneously, by only allowing 'ivy league' colleges access. Even then initial access was by invite only.

Hence, a paid communication service is only useful if everyone you're trying to communicate with is willing to pay for it. A service like this would be difficult to get off the ground in the first place, without a compelling advantage over 'free' (privacy cost based) services. For most people, privacy and accountability (long term costs) will not be a sufficient advantage. If they were, decentralised social networks like Diaspora would have been a success years ago.

The only way I can see it working is if an existing social network with wide reach offered a paid tier. This is problematic however as, in removing the paid users (presumably their wealthiest demographic) from the advertising pool, they're cutting off their own advertisers potential income stream.

Perhaps a 'freemium' model could work, with paid users having access to enhanced features (perhaps making an event, or sending a group message), allowing the network to grow beyond those willing to pay (especially at the outset). But again, I don't think it could scale, unless one of the existing networks abandoned advertising and switched to this model. Given that even free social networks (even ones launched by Google!) currently find it basically impossible to compete with the scale of Twitter / Facebook.

"That said, I think the argument for a 'paid facebook' breaks down quickly when you realise that as a communications / event planning / promotion tool, it's usefulness is directly tied to its network size."

I generally agree with the business analysis as you gave it, to which I'd propose the idea (in conjunction with my other cousin post) that if the government makes it non-viable to build a business whose business model is based solely around selling private information and serving ads , on the grounds that it is short-term enticing to people but long-term destruction to social capital and cohesion (where government regulation is really in its wheelhouse), we could find out whether social networks are viable at all.

Note I didn't target social networks there; the entire business model needs to be made much more expensive. For once, something regulation can accomplish with ease! I almost don't even care about the nature of the regulations, I just want to see this business model made more expensive. It doesn't even have to be banned, per se, it just needs the bar raised so that the bar for "when is it worth it to abuse trust and exploit our information" is a great deal more than $20/year. (I don't necessarily want to ban it; there is value in certain high-end variations of this theme. The corruption is in the way that modern computing has become so cheap that there is no discretion applied for what is grabbed and what is bought & sold, it's just all grabbed and dispensed freely.)

It is possible they are simply not a viable business. Or, once the easy-yet-culturally-destructive option of doing it by abusing human cognitive limitations and screwing over your customers where they can't perceive it and weigh it properly is regulated away, perhaps someone will find a way of delivering enough value that it is something people will pay for, once the weed of the free option is no longer sucking up all the sunlight. There are, for instance, quite a few long-standing paid forums on the internet; it's not an entirely unviable business model.

One thing I'm not doing here is that I am not implicitly accepting as a goal the idea that Facebook itself, or an entity the size of Facebook, will necessarily exist in the new order. (Nor am I directly accusing anybody of doing that, but it's something I feel is ambient in the discussion.) If it turns out to be simply a non-viable business, so be it. As in my opinion Facebook's net social value is negative, that's still a win. If it turns out to be a viable model, but it doesn't scale up, again, so be it. The possibility that those will be the end outcomes does not justify keeping something as destructive as Facebook around.

My best guess is that no single business could grow to Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I would expect significant diversity.

> My best guess is that no single business could grow to Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I would expect significant diversity.

We already have this, it's called the web. I'm not being facetious. I miss the days when google drove traffic not to rapidly updated fluff but deep articles and informed posts. I miss the possibility of communicating with a wide audience with a self hosted blog post. I'm not sure it can come back, but maybe the kind of regulations you suggest - in effect taxing the externalities of data harvesting, are worthwhile considering.

Facebook should have been censured long ago for capturing content, and anti-competitively promoting locally hosted (at the expense of off site content).

This is a whole other issue that's being forgotten with the current privacy debate. Silos away from the open web accelerate and even create polarisation. The filter bubble is both unnecessary and harmful, and as or more important to regulate than privacy.

It's like you've just been brutally assaulted by Facebook and here you are saying, please sir, may I have another?

"Only this time, can we have our social network be backed by the Men with Guns? And why not just cut out the middleman and have it run directly by the intelligence agencies?"

Check back in five years and ask the Chinese how that's going. (Although you won't be allowed to, or at least, they won't be allowed to answer honestly without seeing their social status go way down.)