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Comment by oflannabhra | Hacker News Reader

The spark that triggered the current firestorm Facebook is facing has nothing to do with Facebook’s practices—those have been apparent and obvious since before Facebook is as even a company.

The spark was the confluence of divisive political headwinds and an outrage-driven news cycle.

I’m thankful that spark has resulted in sustained scrutiny of Facebook, but without a similar environment and controversy, I doubt Google will find itself in a hot seat.

Maybe such a controversy is waiting for Google. I hope so, they’ve gathered far more data about me and my interests than Facebook ever will.

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I’ll add a thought:

The great irony in Facebook’s situation is that it is purely the result of hubris. In 2010, Zuckerberg saw FB as the next great platform. The API was released to much acclaim. But the API essentially gave away the keys to the kingdom!

Facebook either 1) didn’t realize that they weren’t a platform and the social graph was the most valuable information they possessed, and were blinded by ignorance, or 2) didn’t want to be “just” an advertisement business, and was blinded by hubris.

Maybe it was a bit of both, but given how engineering driven FB is, I’d guess there was a healthy dose of #2, and probably still is.

In 2010, Facebook's revenue was significantly driven by something other than ads - Social Games. Zynga and the like were raking in billions based on people clicking virtual cows, and Facebook was getting a cut. Promoting these kinds of uses was their goal. It's easy to see modern Ad-Driven FB and forget that there were other eras of the company.

Yes, hindsight is 20/20. However, Google was smart enough to see the endgame: knowing people’s interests is some of the most valuable information available to advertisers, ever.

What Facebook has, and what they essentially gave away for free, is far more valuable than whatever revenue they generated as a “platform.”

The fact FB was generating revenue as a platform in 2010 has more to do with their strategy (which was lacking at the time) than with the value of the information they had.

I’m suggesting they Zuckerberg’s hubris prevented him from seeing the value of what FB already was, and how to monetize that.

> confluence of divisive political headwinds and an outrage-driven news > I doubt Google will find itself in a hot seat

You're suggesting Hollywood will abandon a decade-plus long effort to beat down the influence of big tech, and increase regulation of the Internet, now, when it's going so well?[1] Or that some integrity of governance, quality of public policy, or competence of journalism, will hold them in check?

> Maybe such a controversy is waiting for Google. I hope so,

Controversies against Google will continue to be nurtured, year after year. And one of them, instead of incremental erosion, may well end up being a similar political-media event.

Whether you think this process is a good thing or not, depends in part on what kind of Internet you would like to have.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180226/01415539302/mista...

Well, no, that’s not what I’m suggesting at all.

It sounds like you set up a straw man to be able to assert your own narrative for “Why Google is next.”

It’s all well and fine to offer up an alternative explanation or additional information, but you don’t have to do it by putting words into people’s mouths.

As for the content of your message, I fail to see how Facebook’s current scrutiny is connected to Hollywood in any way whatsoever.

> you don’t have to do it by putting words into people’s mouths

A fair criticism. I'd intended "You're suggesting [...] ?" as a "are you suggesting <implausible thing not-X>?" form of "what about X?" question, rather than as a "you said X" claim. I'd not noticed the second reading. :/ But a less personal phrasing would have avoided the potential for misunderstanding - and consequences. Sorry about that.

> how Facebook’s current scrutiny is connected to Hollywood

Regards "current", tactical politics, perhaps someone else can comment. But the strategic context, part of those "political headwinds", is a long-term lobbying and press campaign to "correct" the "excessive approval" of Facebook et al, and to establish "rules of the road" for the "Wild West" Internet. One can of course agree with part of that, and disagree with the other. But... given a political bandwagon, it seems worth noting the principal conductors, and their intended playlists.

+1 facebook helped to foster the “ze russians snatched hillary’s victory” hysteria abusing their power to pursue their partisan agenda and then suffered when they themselves got on the wrong side of it. Nothing to do with americans’ newfound hightened awareness of privacy really.

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