This medium reached people rich and poor, all around the world.
The challenge here is greed.
One of the interesting topics in economics is the ability to subvert the supply-demand curve by extracting economic value without the participants awareness. In classical economics the equilibrium point is met when the buyer thinks they are paying too much and the seller thinks they are getting to little for a good or service. In the idealized experiment the buyer doesn't have any other choice, nor does the seller have any other customer to turn to.
But in our internet connected world there is an "invisible" (to the buyer) stream of value which is personal information about the buyer. To date there hasn't been a good way for the buyer to see or negotiate that value. GPDR helps that but it doesn't go far enough in some ways.
What GPDR doesn't supply (yet?) is the practical way of enforcing the theft of personally identifiable information for financial gain. So in your example of a hybrid ad model, if you 'opt out' and now pay a fee, how do you know that they aren't still just selling your data? And if they are selling your data to get extra value out of you being a customer, what recourse do you have when you discover it? What risk are they taking by pursuing that path and maximizing their revenue?
EDIT: From the article -- At the time of the sale, WhatsApp was profitable with fee revenue, although it is unclear by how much. (99 cents per year)
Yet, it might be worth contemplating a few details about that. First, it took decades to do so. During almost all of that period, phone use was very expensive for most people, making it something reserved for the rich. It's taken from 1876 to today for almost the entire world to have phone service.
Second, expansion of phone services was often controlled and directed by monopolistic companies. They invariably acted in incredibly greedy ways and had no compunctions about abusing their position(s). Extortionate long distance rates, asserting that only company-owned systems could touch the networks, and more were normal.
I understand why you view phone access as a good model, fundamentally different from an ad-based or subscriber-based model. Yet, it's possible that this approach historically had some rather significant drawbacks that might be worth contemplating.
Those same digital technologies mean a regulated social media monopoly could be much narrower. E.g., we could split Facebook into infra and client apps, or core features versus add-ons. You could make the social graph owned by a non-profit, and regulate it with a board where client app developers are represented. That would provide a much better balance of power than we saw with telcos versus consumers.
So, you're right! Shifts in technology brought prices down to a point where they're affordable to most! That's something enabled by a model that inherently advantages the rich over the poor. But the economic incentives created and encouraged by history and the model are just a detail, not worthy of inspection or being considered part of how we got here.
Right?
As for your proposal, I don't share your optimism for regulated monopolies here. They're a wonderful model for basic needs that everyone shares and that little change will be needed to over time. This describes electricity, water, and in some cases data transport.
It's certainly possible that social media services to date have hit this basic level of common infrastructure. If so, I clearly just don't understand exactly which services that covers or how they're the same level of fundamental as water. Can you help me with this? I need to understand before I can figure out if dismembering Facebook into a publicly owned council-run monopoly is the best way forward.
Especially because this would also probably mean doing something to ensure other, non-council-run social network providers didn't spring up and replace PublicBook.
I honestly don't believe your "help me understand" routine is anything but syrupy and disingenuous, an online rope-a-dope. If you're actually serious, please demonstrate that by providing your own best guess as to a plausible split and your concerns about the model; I'll do my best to help you with that.
I can think of several plausible ways to split up Facebook. The one I can think of that adheres most closely to the basic utility model would be for only the most foundational service to be handled by a regulated monopoly. That, I expect, would be a pseudonymous social graph where people can add and remove connections. Anything on top of that would be handled by third-party providers.
I can imagine other services that some people might consider foundational and thus desire to lump in with the above. Some might consider posts, walls, profiles, and groups part of it. Some might even consider chat part of the foundation.
The "online rope-a-dope" you describe is my attempt to avoid telling people that I am reasonably sure they are being silly. It's always possible that there's genuinely something I don't understand about the positions. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it will continue to happen in the future. It generally doesn't, but telling people I think they are being silly is generally not conducive to productive conversation.
Being over-the-top syrupy nice tends to go over better than pointed criticism, which tends to make people defensive. For example...
Under which set of laws would Facebook be nationalized in your proposal? American? French? English? Turkish? Saudi? What effect would this have on effects to combat fake news and hate speech? Whose definitions of "fake news" and "hate speech"? How are you going to make sure that users don't migrate to a new, better, and non-regulated-monopoly social network the way people migrated to Facebook from MySpace? Are you just going to take over that one too? How do you propose to ensure that client app developers with access to the ruling council don't use their position to push away other client app developers?
These aren't pointlessly detailed questions. They're ones that spring to mind almost immediately, and ones that any serious proposal that merited consideration would need to wrestle with. Some of them are major points of public policy which differ very significantly from polity to polity.
I would like to understand that you've gone through these questions and arrived at good answers. I want that to be true.
You're probably feeling defensive right now. A little attacked. Which is why I couched the whole thing in asking you to help me understand, because a person who feels attacked is not a person who is genuinely listening.
In much of the US, in the 70's, 80's, and 90's a telephone had a fixed monthly fee and 'free' calling to any other phone in the local area. Phone penetration was over 90%[1] in 1970 and rose to over 95% by 1980 suggesting that even those at 50% below the poverty line in 1980 (roughly 6% of the US population) had access to a telephone.
So for many living in the US they have probably experienced being able to talk with all of their friends for "free" as long as they want, and if they were old enough arguing with siblings about who got to use the phone longest.
Further, in the "current" epoch, the article suggested that WhatsApp was profitable at 99 cents per year when it was acquired. I would not be surprised if that it is still the case that such a messaging service does not require advertising revenue to be cash flow positive. It just needs enough subscribers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-wit...
I was early 80s, and watched landline and mobile costs fall to negligible levels.
My current girlfriend was born in the late 80s (USA, but world traveler with family work), and I think from the start of highschool onward pretty much always assumed there was an internet connection and too-cheap-to-care calls even before everyone made their own VOIP/video chat messengers.
Something that came with the Internet, and didn't exist for me prior to its existence, was a large body of friends who were not local to me. Today, if I had to go back to metered long distance rather than what we have today it would absolutely be cost prohibitive! And clearly some people move around more than others and for them they might have a lot of friends and family outside of their local calling region back then as well.
The bottom line is that I can see the point you were making but I think we disagree on the magnitude of its impact on the general population that was living with phones at that time.
I left my smartphone and my smartwatch in my smart home when I went to work today (guess I'm not that smart).
I hear through the grapevine that my wife is losing her coolant because she can't text me every ten minutes, or locate me with Find My Friends.
I think I'll stop at a tiki bar on the way home.
We had multiple independent local phone companies one place I lived. I could call into the next state for free (and by dialing just five numbers), but my friends two miles away in the same state were 35¢ a minute.
As a point of interest, back when people used dialaround numbers to get lower long distance rates (800-Easy-ITT for ITT, 800-Pin-Drop for SPRINT, 950-4MCI for MCI, or 1010-NJB for New Jersey Bell, etc...) there was at least one service that would make you listen to an ad before connecting the call. In exchange, you got a super-low rate.
I don't know if it failed because of the advertising, or because the line quality was terrible.
I think that reasonably priced subscription model, perhaps taking in account the per capita income of the country, could help preserve privacy while also ensuring mass access to technologies.
> Let's say you have a subscriber model,
There was a company with a subscriber model. It worked pretty well and we loved it. Facebook bought it and destroyed the very idea behind it.
> but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.
The same kind of world were all kinds of tech is expensive at first and then becomes cheaper and cheaper as it approaches and enter mainstream usage?
Nobody would argue today that we should have refused luxury cars to add airbags because "what kind of world would it be where only the rich has access to safer cars".
In the same way we shouldn't argue against people paying for better products.
That said, I think WhatsApp were planning to add other paid options like API access etc before they got eaten by Facebook.
Is it possible that perhaps this has been considered before, and perhaps even implemented?
It's also what email is.
Yet, you're describing email still in essence. A system where people interact very rapidly in a distributed, authority-less magic box based network. Email happens to be chunk-y, though in practice it tends to be nearly as fast as chat.
But I'll humor you. Now you're describing XMPP. Magic sandboxed chat applications, peer-to-peer, NAS storage, authority-free, and monitization-free. Wrap it up in Docker or something, and you have your turnkey magic. Right? Right!
You still have all the problems that come with this. For example, stemming abuse is a major problem with decentralized systems. How do you stop spammers? Appeal to the decentralized community and hope? Peer pressure has never been enough to stop this. Authority and trust problems run rife. Most users are too ignorant and unskilled to look after their systems properly, which is a problem you won't be able to magic away.
I'm trying to be nice here. You're re-inventing email, in a way that does nothing to stem the basic problems of email. You have all the idealism that created email to begin with - lovely, beautiful, admirable idealism! - and little of the pragmatism.
Fundamentally, there have been two kinds of decentralized, authority-less, un-monetized networks: those that are unpopular and those that become popular enough to be subject to a ton of abuse. Abuse that leads to professional service offerings that re-centralize, re-intermediate, and re-monetize the services in order to make them usable to ordinary people again. It's absolutely possible that your idea would be neither of those! It's just that so far I've not been shown anything convincing that this could be the case.
This is a strawman. I give you Usenet and IRC as counter examples.
Facebook can also employ the experience of it's Russian clone vk.com and let users share music (sharing the music that you like and that expresses the mood you'd like to share is a great way to communicate and many people love it!) while requiring those users who'd like to play long playlists in background pay a subscription fee.
A number of other premium features that can add value to a subscription comes on to my mind as well: invisible mode (I'd pay for it immediately - I really hate when others can see if I'm online or if I've read their message, I have been actively hating this for years, this is infuriating yet I don't mind if solving this problem would cost a dollar or two per month), posts promotion, additional typesetting features, profile promotion (top-suggest everybody to add me as a friend), verified status for whoever wants it (not just celebrities), voluntary additional surveillance/curation (for parents willing to protect their underage kids) etc. Introducing a cryptocurrency dedicated to replace old-fashioned likes (e.g. every time somebody likes your post/comment you get a coin) yet traded at a cryptocurrency exchange and accepted as a way of paying for the premium features can be another opportunity. Organic possibilities are limitless.
note I'm not suggesting we go back to that model. only pointing out we had a non ad based system before
(I've been toying with models like this for awhile, and not to say its an easy or simple solution to implement, especially when considering bad actors, but it seems the best chance at getting something "fair")
Alternatively could steal from games and add "cosmetics". Charge extra for things like themes that personalize but don't necessarily improve the experience. Items with enough value that people will "want" it but not "need" it.
No, there aren’t; this is a political line that doesn’t make any sense at all. This is why “livable wage” is a phrase: just getting above the poverty line does not imply you can live on your income. The poverty line is pegged too low to be meaningful, at least here in US.
Let's say you have a subscriber model, but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.
Or you have a hybrid ad model with the ability to opt out by paying some fee. Than what kind of world will that be when privacy is a luxury item limited to how much you can afford.
The best solution I can think of is keeping the current model, but adding regulation and government oversight to limit some of the most damaging effects i.e. creating platforms that abuse human psychology to keep people clicking and make them addicted to these platforms.
I'm genuinely interested in other models people suggest.