> But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.

That doesn’t make it ok

Who said it did?

What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.

I don't understand why you're downvoted. The government does profit a lot from social networks, especially domestic ones. Just look at the US' handling of TikTok.

What the government wants to accomplish with the Facebook hearings, political grandstanding and blathering, is a harness, control to their political power benefit. They're playing a political game of conquest. There is no scenario where they're going to destroy it.

As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.

Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.

[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/

[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."

You are completely missing the direction in which this happens! The US government itself has little power, it is a shell that represents the interests of several capitalists. The best known are: the oil industry, the financial industry, the war industry (which works together with the other two), the pharmaceutical industry, along with several rich families like the Koch family, the Walton family, etc. These powerful interests write laws and control the country's assets. They don't want to be bothered by an individual actor like Zuckerberg. That's how congress moves, to protect the interests of the majority of the capitalist oligarchy in this country.

Yes; another way of looking at it is that the US government represents the "dictatorship of Capital". Its job is to represent the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. This includes managing conflicts between individuals, firms, or industries that might otherwise threaten the stability of the system, even if they have to step on particular individuals, firms, or even industries in order to do so. That's how we got the New Deal; even though many big capitalist opposed it, their representatives as a whole saw it as necessary to prevent a Communist revolution, and therefore worth the cost.

> Yes; another way of looking at it is that the US government represents the "dictatorship of Capital".

When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.

I mean, the bourgeois revolutions were progressive in the context of their time.

True. And some of the US founders seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible, reasonably accurate proxy for merit & general fitness, and so, that they were founding a meritocracy. It's not as if everyone was setting out to do something bad, or even that, in the context of the time, what they did was particularly bad.

> seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible

This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.

yes, congress & the executive branch certainly want to control facebook and other large corps. it’s less obvious that they’ll do so, given the power that their vast capital reserves provides the largest companies.

this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).

both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.

Finally an honest comment about the nature of statecraft, governance and geopolitics. Bravo!

> Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his.

He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).

Oh, I know. Which is why it'll never happen, and why the "message" (as in McLuhan) of the medium of the Internet is authoritarianism.

Saying it will never happen and doing nothing to help it happen is the first step to ensuring it will never happen.

I think you’re getting downvotes by saying “it’ll never happen” which I find unfortunate because I think the observation that the Internet’s fundamental mode (“message”) as authoritarianism is incredibly interesting and worth discussing. The internet wasn’t created with this goal and yet it seems there is significant evidence to support this idea.

> I think you’re getting downvotes by saying “it’ll never happen” which I find unfortunate

Fatalism is how Bad Things survive in a committee-government such as ours. :-\

Clarification: I agree fatalism is bad, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a conversation around the rest of the comment.

The fatalist comment from GP distracted entirely from the value-add content and I added to that distraction. Blurg. :-\

Sorry y'all. I am prone to thinking technological determinism's more right than not, and to seeing the stable outcome of "games" as inevitable unless the terms of the games themselves can be altered, and there's usually not much interest in doing that. Maybe that makes me part of the problem, but I'm pretty sure nothing in the actual world would change if I flipped around to a "we can, actually, realistically, fix this" attitude. Realistically, I'm not going to throw the significant resources behind anything that'd be required to have slightly-better-than-winning-the-Powerball odds of making an actual difference, which makes me the same as 99.999% of people, at least. I ain't rich enough to pay others to care about and work toward the causes I'd support in my place, to a degree that it'd actually affect anything, so that'd mostly be lots and lots of actual hours of my life, for a ticket at a slim chance of anything getting better.

Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.

Yessir, understood. There's just no positive outcome from agreeing with one's adversary that "resistance is futile".

Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.