I agree: I don't have the same concerns with Facebook as with, say, a monopoly ISP.
That said, in both cases I think there's an opportunity to define customer data as containing a responsibility and liability, so that collecting it is a double-edged activity and there are potential repercussions causing companies to guard its dispersal with more care.
The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."
> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.
Maybe so, but Facebook has shown a willingness to spend the money to acquire control of those evolving trends to maintain its dominance (see: Instagram, Whatsapp, and the failed attempt to buy Snapchat).
At a minimum I think it should be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp.
A lot of harm can be done in one generation. Don't you think the history shows us that?
Look at Microsoft. Windows’ golden period lasted from 1998 until 2006 with the release of Vista. With the release of Vista, Microsoft’s strangle hold on relevance disintegrated in a summer. And now what? Microsoft technically “exists” but who cares?
We are witnessing Facebook’s Vista moment right now. Donald Trump is Facebook’s Windows Vista.
Think about that for a second.
Modern marketing has ensured that everyone in the US born after the'80s has grown up in an environment of marketing saturation, but modern marketing/propaganda was invented in the early 20th century. (Thanks, Edward Bernays) It changed our lives and the way we think, from Fascist propaganda to Coldwar rhetoric, and to the belief that orange juice is a breakfast drink and the engagement ring is a thing.
FB is one of thousands of powerful entities continuing the tradition, but of course, data mining has reached obscene levels, but FB is only one of many players.
We’ll emerge from this a little wiser, and maybe with some new regulations. Whether regulation is good or bad I can’t say, but this is all very much a learning process as a society and, to some potentially great extent, as an industry.
Frankly, I think crossing this line was necessary.
assuming what you said is true, should we allow the next FB a generation of leeway too? A generation here and a generation there...