The entire idea of anti-trust (and frankly, the premise of most western democracies) is to prevent the over-concentration of power.
Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now, far more powerful than most nation states. I'm not sure that we as a society have ever dealt with a non-state actor this powerful before.
Germany's response of essentially "yeah no, we're not letting Facebook make money here," seems prudent to me.
“Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now, far more powerful than most nation states”
Op did not clarify his reasoning. Though I have thought about this and here are mine.
If strip down a “nation state” to its bare essence, it is an idea. Lines drawn on a map, and symbols(flags, anthems etc). Add in the government directing education, and we end up with masses that can be influenced to behave in specific ways. i.e socialisation and sense of identity.
Now, we know that government plays a significant part in the country and in the world.
Now let’s consider FB. FB has by far the largest network of people that are connected in one massive network. I suspect Information (memes) could spread much faster on Fb, Whatsapp and insta than they could prior to these. Even email was never as fast. Since FB has control of the network without over sight on the algorithms and filtering, they wield significant power to shape global conversations. Shaping global conversations fundamentally can lead to over throwing of leaders with out ever a bullet being shot, it could lead to genocide, nationalism etc etc.
It’s no surprise that the EU is on high alert.
Edit: I think this requires more exploring. This is fundamentally a war against a new form of influence & control of masses of people.
See previous wars: religion vs state, state vs monarchy etc etc.
Has anyone considered this perspective before? Would appreciate any links
The east India trading company and the hudson's bay company as well as I'm sure some others were as large as or larger than some state actors of their time.
This is hyperbole at best. Facebook does not have an army, weapons, or literally anyone that would be willing to die or even be physically put out to defend it.
I’m no Facebook fan, but let’s not let Facebook hysteria overrun these comments.
“This is hyperbole at best. Facebook does not have an army”
Op was pointing out that power != war with guns
“Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now”
The comment was how power could be achieved via other methods of warfare-including the ability to shape conversations.
Another word for this would be competition. He has a point.
The ability to shape conversations or to compete is not the same as making war (or you are relying on an idiosyncratic definition of "war").
War (Noun) " - a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism
- a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end
- a struggle to achieve a goal: War (Verb): " - to be in active or vigorous conflict
- to carry on active hostility or contention
"
The point still stands. War is an isomorphism for competition, conflict and tension between parties. One could probably use something like category theory and prove it.
References:
> Data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. It’s being weaponized to wage cultural and political warfare. People everywhere are in a battle for control of our most intimate personal details. From award-winning filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, THE GREAT HACK uncovers the dark world of data exploitation with astounding access to the personal journeys of key players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal.
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
Was that an act of war against democratic Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
"The governments of India[30][31] and Brazil[32][33] demanded that Cambridge Analytica report how anyone used data from the breach in political campaigning, and various regional governments in the United States have lawsuits in their court systems from citizens affected by the data breach.[34] On April 25, 2018, Facebook released their first earnings report since the scandal was reported. Revenue fell since the last quarter, but this is usual as it followed the holiday season quote. The quarter revenue was the highest for a first quarter, and the second overall.[35] In early July 2018, the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office announced it intended to fine Facebook £500,000 ($663,000) over the data scandal, this being the maximum fine allowed at the time of the breach, saying Facebook "contravened the law by failing to safeguard people's information".[36] In March 2019, a court filing by the U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia alleged that Facebook knew of Cambridge Analytica's "improper data-gathering practices" months before they were first publicly reported in December 2015.[37] In July 2019, the Federal Trade Commission voted to approve fining Facebook around $5 billion to finally settle the investigation to the scandal, with a 3-2 vote.[38] Facebook established Social Science One as a response to the event."
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/2...
How could anyone besides them prove effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this campaign? I don't think it's possible. At the very least, the side they supported won (Brexit) and they should not be trusted.
Leave.UK was accused of violating electoral law. I believe the Electoral Commission has now dropped its investigation.
Incidentally, to break UK law, you usually have to perform the violating act in the UK (we have a few laws that involve extraterritoriality, but they are far and few).
Faceache barely does anything in the UK. They apparently make no money here; they don't sell stuff (not even advertising - that would be the Republic of Ireland). CA collected data on US citizens; that's legal here (and would have been of very little interest to Brexit campaigners). As far as I know, nothing CA did violated UK or EU law.
You say "the side they supported won (Brexit)". Do you mean that Faceache supported Brexit? I don't think they had a dog in the race at all. Or do you mean CA? It's been argued that CA took money to provide services to Leave.UK, but that's not the same as saying they supported Brexit.
Trying to "swing elections" is legal in the UK. In fact it is encouraged; people who successfully swing elections often get appointed to important positions such as Prime Minister. It's completely legal to hire polling companies to help you better understand the voters. It's completely legal to hire advertising companies to promote the electoral outcome you want promoted.
Now you are speaking of trust; of course, I trust neither CA (now defunct) nor Faceache. But Faceache did not drag my country into wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Faceache did not have that much power. The UK joined those wars largely because of diplomatic pressure from the USA - a much more powerful entity than this rather tedious online advertising company.
From what I have read, and despite their bragging, CA wasn't even helpful to the Leave.UK campaign. Their data wasn't relevant, and anyway Leave.UK didn't have the organisational capacity to make use of whatever data they could offer.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/11/leaveeu-fin...
You are correct that they haven't (been charged with having) broken electoral law in the UK, but they have broken data protection laws in relation to the information which was then used by Cambridge Analytica:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/11/facebook-...
Whether that information was then used by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Brexit campaign is open to more questions.
Facebook is an echo chamber. People don’t go there to be informed; they go there to validate their already held beliefs. Given the large ideological chasm between the two candidates in the 2016 election, it defies logic that even a single voter was swayed or chose not to vote at all based on ads they saw on Facebook.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-elect...
Of course it's impossible to say whether Trump would have won even if he hadn't spent any money on Facebook ads, but we're talking about a campaign that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in total. If this amount of money doesn't include enough to influence 78k people to go out and vote for a specific candidate, then we might as well give up on the very concept of advertising.
Now whether things should be this way am not sure, but a nation simply paying its debt off without significant changes to the role debt plays is not the answer.
Western democracies historically have been party to increasing the power of private companies through government protection from competition (corporate welfare). The first example that popped in my head was the provision of prison labor for U.S. Steel through convict leasing.
There are numerous examples though, link below from Mises (admittedly a source with a conservative bias, but theres still good info there).
https://mises.org/wire/government-created-monopolies-are-eve...
It would seem to me that governments provide preferential treatment to private companies when it is beneficial for the government and they provide roadblocks and difficulties to companies who would be detrimental to the government. This is of course a generalization and not a hard-and-fast rule that explains every instance of government behavior when viewed in respect to a private company.
No it isn't, not even close. At most it's the third most powerful tech company, after Alphabet and Amazon.
Certainly purchase data is very powerful (ask supermarkets!), but I think it pales in comparison to the breadth of data Facebook and Google collect.
I might also be biased towards underestimating Facebook since nobody in my social circle actually uses Facebook or Instagram. I guess Facebook is more powerful than I gave it credit for, though it still pales in comparison to Alphabet.
> I'm not sure that we as a society have ever dealt with a non-state actor this powerful before.
Amazon and Google being of somewhat similar or greater power at least tempers down that statement. And unlike Facebook they have really good reputations outside specific parts of circles like the tech circle.
There are benefits and drawbacks to social media/everyone has a voice. On a benign level, the NYTimes released a story misinforming its readership that Apple was proactively promoting its own apps. This was cleared up on Twitter by @drbarnard whose view was promoted via Stratechary.
I realize there is a lot more complexity to nation-states creating false narratives around China or Hong Kong protests, but on a basic level, I believe social media allows a quicker iteration cycle to correct misinformed views with the drawback of initial misinformation traveling at a greater velocity.
In many ways, you can get a more informed and accurate view of the situation in Hong Kong today if you have the propensity to avoid overreacting to the first piece of information and developing a skillset for finding the right person to listen to.
To me that signals they have less 'control' of the distribution of information on their own platform. It's debatable who could wield more social influence, Google or Facebook. On me, it'd certainly be Google, since I use about a dozen google products (Chrome, Gmail, Search, Mesh, Calendar, Analytics, Voice, Android, Scholar, Cloud, Maps, etc.), and zero Facebook products.
Europe as a market has higher taxes, more regulation, and has more cultural barriers giving us a huge disadvantage when trying to compete in the global market with the big US (or increasingly Chinese) tech companies.
Unfortunately I think we may need protectionist policies like this if we want to develop our own tech companies and products. It's the same situation the US is in with manufacturing. The US simply can't compete with countries like China, so if the US is passionate about preserving its manufacturing sector the only answer is protectionism.
I don't think it's an "anti-US-big-tech attitude" so much as an aversion to companies that have repeatedly been found to break the law (be it tax, competition, privacy or otherwise).
You don't (at least I don't) really see much hostility towards Apple, Netflix or Microsoft, despite them being large US tech companies.
The only examples I can come up with for companies Europeans might be hostile towards are companies that have given Europeans reason to be hostile: Facebook (tax, privacy), Google (tax, privacy, competition), Amazon (workers' rights) or Uber (workers' rights, flagrant disregard of the law).
If European companies behaved the same way, they'd face the same consequences (feel free to give counter-examples). I think the reason you hear about American companies so much more often is because:
- They're big, so violations are big and fines are big, making them big targets and big news
- They often break the law (perhaps because they're used to operating in America, which is relatively lawless when it comes to competition and privacy), making them easy targets
- You're reading English-speaking media, so you're less likely to hear about say a mid-sized German or French company being fined
I'm not sure whose fault that is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/05/ireland-r...
This amounts to "our country is bad at [thing], so let's restrict trade for [thing] to protect our industries."
Of course it sounds great until other countries counter by restricting the thing you are good at, and then everyone loses.
In the case of Libra, a validator needs to be brought into the Libra foundation, subject to approval of current members and a membership fee of 10 million USD.
So you can see Bitcoin (permissionless PoW) and Ethereum 2.0 (permissionless PoS) as anonymous, permissionless cooperatives where everyone is playing on the same field, whereas Libra consists of a small consortium of large corporates who can set the rules as they wish.
It's very different when there's a company with its own financial interests manning the door, regardless of what company that is.
A ban make most things commercially unviable. If botcoin had widespread use a ban would make it an underground payment system.
Digital services ppl ban child porn and gambling.
Sucks you are downvoted because you are right
Just because Bitcoin is decentralized doesn't mean that a country can't ban it within its own borders. To do that, all a country would need to do is pass a law making it a crime to own or use Bitcoin, while also prosecuting people who didn't report profits from illicit Bitcoin transactions with tax evasion. At that point, no legitimate business in the country would be able to accept Bitcoin or convert it to cash, and the vast majority of citizens wouldn't risk fines or imprisonment to use it.
Since, at this time, a very small fraction of the population uses crytocurrencies (or even knows what they are), enacting such a law probably wouldn't face a lot of resistance, especially if it were presented as a measure to fight crime or terrorism.
* - Intentional typo, for a double entendre.
If, for example, Goldman Sachs did the same thing, that might not go over smoothly, but I don't think it would see such a negative reaction. I'd assume that feels more in line with the status-quo, whereas tech companies getting involved in financial instruments is not as familiar.
I more so wonder what would happen if a company like Stripe did this. They are sort of a "financial" company, but I'd say also undoubtedly a "tech" company too.
All the media coverage on Libra is incredibly dishonest and ill-informed.
Distrusting them is the only logical conclusion given their track record and power.
Libra isn't a decentralized crypto currency, it's a new fiat currency minted by a private corporation with a very questionable track record and an uncomfortable amount of concentrated power. It's also seated in a country with a very weak track record enforcing rules on giant corporation misbehaving.
Users choosing to use something they collectively create and control is very different than this type of centralized power moves. They are in essence trying to bring billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of the worlds savings into US jurisdiction (and likely invested in the US economy via bonds and stocks)
Good decision on the part of Germany and France IMO. I hope more countries follow their example and protect their sovereignty.
That's not true:
> What are the actual assets that will be backing each Libra coin? The actual assets will be a collection of low-volatility assets, including bank deposits and government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks.[0]
[0] https://libra.org/en-US/about-currency-reserve/#the_reserve
> bank deposits and government securities
Your point doesn't contradict mine. It actually re-enforces it.
What percentage will be in US deposits and government securities? US bank deposits get invested into the market, so yes, this would take the money from someone in France, who would currently hold savings in a French bank involved in the local economy and move it to Facebook's vault.
The very link you provided lacks transparency and is exactly the type of reason I distrust Facebook. In fact it doesn't have a single #, percentage or actual thing I could verify/which they are committing to, the language is vague... I'm guessing intentionally so.
But you're right that the token is backed by something, mainly one to one reserves of currencies and government bonds. So you're okay with bitcoin, that has a market cap of over $100bn that's backed by nothing, but someone creates a cryptocurrency that's backed by one to one reserves of the safest investments in the world and that's somehow extremely questionable.
This is factually wrong. Facebook controls a very small portion of Libra (<1/10): https://libra.org/en-US/partners/
Let's just use Bitcoin vs. Libra, because bitcoin is much easier to type than cryptocurrency.
You know, instead of typing up a list of the pros and cons of allowing your citizens to use bitcoin vs. libra, I'll just talk about the underlying premise.
I think that as a government, you don't want to lose control of the money supply. That includes:
* How the money is used * Inflation * (And unfortunately, nowadays) tracking the money.
Looking at this from the point of view of a government, it seems pretty dangerous to put all those controls in the hands of a company.
Personally, I would be against this decision for any company, not matter how well liked.
Situations change, and then the powerful can change the rules.