Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)
Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.
Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.
Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.
Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.
Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.
So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.
Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for
developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based
and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of
technologies including hardware-based trusted execution
environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure
mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables
the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency,
and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal
data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms,
and verified attributes and provides each user with a
3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives
individuals control over their identities and their data
and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive,
and transparent digital ecosystems.
https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
-Inelastic demand
-Region-specific
-Few or zero consumer alternatives
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
Its time we discuss this.
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
But putting Facebook and shopping for clothes on the same footing isn't. And the "Facebook causes depression" arguments are utterly unconvincing.
Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?
Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
Taxes.
Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.
Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.
I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.
PS - There's an easy way to bet on this, just buy some stock :)
EDIT - Well, technically, you want to short the stock.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/facebook-scores-a-deal-to-...
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
tell that to the millions of people who get most of their news via facebook. Zuckerburg also disagrees (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/fbonc/)
It's the default communication mechanism for many people.
Telephones stink and we still use them because they are a standard.
> I don't think myspace is a fad. > It's the default communication mechanism for many people.
This is just as relevant.
Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.
The technology medium is completely irrelevant.
It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.
My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.
Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.
I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.
Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.
I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
* Experts are beginning to disagree with this http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
* Facebook workers recently admitted to filtering content they didn't agree with (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...)
* Zuckerburg controls facebook: http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking
*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=addictiveness+of+social...
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
There's a trivial error in your example: I can upload the photo of you to Facebook, and there's no mechanism you can use to take it down.
Basically impossible if you have friends that use Facebook - which most people have unless you run only in very specific circles.
That's all well and good until you get to US Customs and they demand to see your Facebook before they let you back in the country.
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
Building a wall isn't going to fix climate change. Facebook is clearly a threat to a free society, but it may be the only chance we have.
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)