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facebook is a Much like a landfill, not only because it’s full of other people’s shit, but because, while everyone agrees something What needs to be done, no one seems to know what.What most (US) commentators have in common, however, is where they look for answers: the trust-busting and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when activists and politicians broke up the harmful concentration of economic power from oil to railroads . Applying antitrust protections to Facebook has been discussed to death; so, there are Facebook ideas too Public utilities– as a socially responsible resource such as water and electricity.
The first question in this debate is whether Facebook should be considered a public utility.Wired reporter Gerard Edelman think it’s not. Susan Crawford also think it’s not, or shouldn’t, mainly because (paraphrasing) she feels that the infrastructure it provides is not core enough for society Yes a utility.
Others have argued for viewing Facebook as a public utility, but disagreed with what that might mean. Dipayan Gosh, in Harvard Business Review, say it is, and the response should be to regulate how companies handle data processing, merging, and advertising and hate speech.This position is very consistent with that of danah boyd, who Positioning Facebook as a utility was proposed back in 2012, an important difference from Gosh’s view of the utility approach as a panacea; things to do replace any other action.
I happen to think some of Facebook’s services are so important that they can be considered part of the social infrastructure and The appropriate response, shall we say, to an endless string of corporate self-delusions is to impose regulation. But the bigger question is that treating Facebook as a public utility requires answering not only the question of whether it is a public utility, but also to which “public” it should be accountable — a much more difficult question.
tech companies like Claiming they are innovative, disruptive, and offer us unprecedented prospects – but Facebook and its problems are outdated when it comes to sociopolitical dynamics. Like, 19th century. Before the Internet reshaped American society, it was reshaped by railroads, power companies, water suppliers, and a host of other new industries and resources—all of which were privately controlled and highly centralized, and ultimately wielded enormous political power.
The 19th century solution came in two forms: breaking the monopoly and reshaping it. What’s “undermining” is antitrust law, which sees monopolies as ostensibly bad things and tries to aggressively force the companies that hold them to dissolve. “Reshaping” is for situations where monopoly itself is not a problem. Railroads, electricity, water: There are some very clear public advantages to standardizing these, because if the track specs or voltage standards change every hundred miles (or a hundred houses), they lose a lot of practical use.
In this case, Louis Brandeis and the wider progressive movement instead advocated the “public utility” model. Companies and industries with “natural monopolies”—in some ways centralization is an important part of the product premise—are not broken up, but are forced to obey different rules and institutions of public responsibility.
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