Stupid Idea Of The Day: Let's Nationalize Facebook!

Stupid Idea Of The Day: Let's Nationalize Facebook!

 Facebook is a little like the weather in that old joke: Everyone loves to complain about it, but no one ever does anything about it. So thoroughly have its failings been hashed over, it can be tough to come up with a genuinely new criticism. So I have to take my hat off to Philip Howard for offering what is, as far as I know, a knock no one has ever articulated before:

The problem with Facebook is that it’s not operated by the federal government. Writing on Slate, Howard, a professor of information technology policy at Princeton University, makes the case for nationalizing the massive social networking site.

While Howard couches his proposal as “a great thought experiment” and acknowledges that it’s probably outside the realm of the possibility, he’s sincere in his belief that that “the benefits outweigh the risks,” and that it’s fair to hold Facebook to a higher standard of public accountability and scrutiny than other companies must meet.

“Facebook is now public infrastructure, and it should be treated as such,” he writes. Should it, though? I like a good thought experiment, so let’s extend this one a bit. Let’s say the federal government somehow found a constitutional mechanism to seize control of Facebook. (Howard seems to think it could be done on anti-monopoly grounds; we’ll get to that.)

What would happen to innovation in Silicon Valley? What would be the effect of demonstrating that the reward of building the most envied company in America — one that’s actually profitable and employs thousands of people and provides a platform for other businesses, large and small — is getting seized by the government?

What effect would that have on the flow of capital? But you don’t even need to go there to see the flaws in Howard’s idea. As bad as it looks when you pull back the camera and take in the big picture, it holds up even worse when you zoom in on the details. Let’s take a closer look at some of his arguments.

Privacy. Howard: “Few of us fully understand Facebook’s privacy policy, much less keep track of changes. People are sharing more personal information on Facebook than they think they are. And for every dozen Facebook users in the United States, one does not use privacy settings — either because that person doesn’t care or doesn’t know enough about how the privacy settings can be used.

 One out of nine people who ride in automobiles still don’t use seatbelts, either because they don’t know the statistics around how they save lives or they don’t care. Is that a reason to nationalize all the car companies?

 Anti-competitiveness. Howard: “With 80 percent of market share, Facebook is already a monopoly.” This is asserted without a citation or link, so I don’t know what, exactly, Facebook is supposed to have an 80% share of. Not that it’s a far-fetched number:

According to Hitwise, Facebook’s share of visits to social networking sites is about 62%. But is that a meaningful statistic?

 Comparing Facebook, with its vast range of products, to a micro-messaging service like Twitter or a career-oriented site like LinkedIn is totally apples-to-oranges. And using site visits as your measuring stick only gives you a picture of the past, not the future. For the latter, you have to look at mobile usage, where Facebook’s dominance is far from established. Indeed, FORBES contributor Eric Jackson makes a pretty solid argument that Facebook might not exist at all in five years, much less have the entire internet in a headlock.

 Political expression. Howard: 

“Facebook communications are an important tool for democracy advocates, including those who helped organize the Arab Spring. Yet the user policy of requiring that democratic activists in authoritarian regimes maintain ‘real’ profiles puts activist leaders at risk….Rather than allow Facebook to serve authoritarian interests, if nationalized in the United States, we could make Facebook change its identity policy to allow democracy activists living in dictatorships to use pseudonyms.

 So the problem is that activists who use Facebook to organize are in danger of having their identities exposed or otherwise being spied on. Howard’s solution is to entrust the duty of safeguarding their privacy to the U.S. government — the same U.S. government that wiretapped without warrants and accidentally exposed the identities of Afghans who risked their lives to help American military units. Yup. Great idea. Another thought experiment: Let’s imagine that Twitter was government-run. Would it still have fought the attempts by prosecutors to get their hands on deleted tweets posted by an Occupy Wall Street protester?

 Public health. Howard: “Facebook’s data harvesting could be used to improve public policy, yet scholars rarely find the company willing to collaborate on important research questions…. A publicly accessible, central way of sharing data would allow better access for social and public health researchers.” This isn’t a terrible point. If public health officials could be using Facebook’s data to monitor diseases or otherwise keep people from getting sick or dying, then Facebook ought to cooperate. But there’s no reason it has to be nationalized to make that happen.

Google already helps track the spread of flu strains around the world, and it’s still part of the private sector last time I checked. By all means, let’s pressure Facebook to do more than it’s already doing. But must we resort to extortion? Whatever the hell this means: “While most U.S. citizens and most global citizens treat Facebookas their social network infrastructure, the firm is greatly understaffed: It has about 4,000 employees serving nearly 1 billion users.” In other words, if Facebook were a high school, it would have a really bad student/teacher ratio. You wouldn’t want to send your kids there.

 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/08/17/stupid-idea-of-the-day-lets-nationalize-facebook/2/